K. Marvin Bruce

I recently had a glimpse of a publisher’s handbook to authors.  This was a handbook for academic books.  Not that I ever personally have had use for one, but anyway, curiosity drives feline morbidity.  A great deal of the handbook deals with ebooks. This got me to thinking—since publishers are so beholden to electronic publication, the use of technology is now driving how authors write.  We are being limited by our own devices.  Consider: any books should now be readable via internet, Kindle, Nook, iBook, iPhone, Android, you get the picture.  Many of these platforms have their own programming requirements. I never ran into the word “chunky” in academics before.  To me, chunky is an adjective appropriate to ice cream or peanut butter, not units of text.  I was, of course, wrong. Chunky text is text that keeps information in small blocks.  It allows for skimming, not taking the time to ...

A writer’s life is one of introspection and self-doubt.  There’s nothing like the ratio of rejection slips to acceptance emails to drive home the message that somehow your words are defective, your thoughts substandard, your ideas puerile.  Then a miracles happens.  A small miracle. It was a bleary-eyed Monday morning.  I hadn’t even bothered checking my email for a few days, sometimes trembling at the very thought.  Some days there’s only so much criticism I can take.  But this was something good. On a whim I entered a story in Calliope ’s annual writing contest.  This story had been rejected a total of seven times, but I believed in it.  Calliope is associated with Mensa, and I had an intelligent subtext to the tale—my stories are never about what they seem to be.  I sent it in and tried to forget it. The forgetting part worked, for the most part.  Daily life attempts to drown my writing hour from time to time.  Most...

I’ve got them all fooled.  In my life I’ve held several jobs.  At each interview, at each performance review, I’ve convinced them I’m a good employee.  They think I’m a professor, or whatever the job happened to be before that.  In reality, I’m the trickster. I’m the individual who can’t be categorized.  You see, I’ve been a writer since I was a kid living on a pittance of an allowance and whatever I could earn from a summer job in a small, economically depressed town.  In my time off I was writing. Some day, I knew, someone would recognize my talent.  I would be paid for my stories and novels.  Nobody would know who I was—least of all my employers.  That dream refuses to die, despite the decades and the reams of unpublished material that coat my study.  Dutifully I trudge off to work. On a winter not unlike this one, I recall working for an employer whose employee handbook stated that the office would be closed for ...

Sometimes it is all I can countenance even to consider submitting a piece of fiction for publication.  You know, I always thought artists were sensitive people, but these days we’re told to have thick skins—not to take rejection personally.  “I’m sorry, but I don’t like what you’ve spent hours and hours creating, honing, and polishing.  It’s nothing personal.” My day job is a professor at a nondescript college.  I still do research now and again, and like my fiction it is generally rejected before somebody else picks it up and says its worth a look.  Sometimes it is said even to be good. I wrote a scholarly book some years back.  I sent it around to publishers who didn’t like it for various reasons, and so it languished while I moved on to other things.  Recently three publishers approached me about it, expressing an interest.  Ah, editors!  Ye are such a fickle breed! Fiction, however, is far more personal.  It is mined fro...

I know many editors.  They are always hungry for good material, but in the course of their duties they have to turn quite a few writers away.  Some of the writers, I’m assured, are just this side of insane.  Some have probably never even considered suicide. Editors are sometimes a writer’s worst enemy.  I know deep in my confused web of consciousness that I am a writer.  I have written fiction with a pathological insistence since before my middle school days.  Six novels bear my name.  Not one has merited publication. I wonder about the ethics of editors.  Who made them the gatekeepers of what is worthy of living or dying?  Nine years of my life were spent in higher education, terminating in a Ph.D. that bears no street cred.  How am I to convince an editor I’m no slouch?  Disposable. Anyone with server space and a few extra hours a week can be an editor.  Yes, for just a little storage space, you too can tur...

My short story, “Night Jogger,” has just appeared in the excellent online magazine Danse Macabre .  You can read it here . A couple of conflicting truisms rebound throughout fiction writing: write what you know and don’t write what actually happened.  All fiction is autobiographical—how can it not be?  The only question is how deeply to layer the metaphor. I wrote “Night Jogger” because I used to jog in the dark.  The unevenness of the sidewalk in the diminished light led to more than just one spill on the hard concrete.  In fact, this happened to me again just last month.  I’m not as young as I used to be. While out in the dark, in jogging togs, you are terribly vulnerable.  Your trusted senses fool you.  Those people loitering on the street corner are in reality trees at a distance.  That person sitting on the porch is really a round house address plaque above a lawn chair.  Reality is no longer real. The truth ...

Writing keeps me sane.  Writing drives me insane.  Often the only stability that I have in a tortured world is my writing.  Of course, writing doesn’t pay.  Long ago I made myself a note inside the cover of my commonplace book: “whether published or not, I am a writer.” A factor that is difficult to include in this equation is depression.  Like many writers I live in a miasma of low-grade depression much of the time.  It even fuels my art.  I write my most humorous material when I am despondent.  There is a depression that is debilitating, however, and even causes writing to become a strain. “There is a wisdom that is woe,” Herman Melville wrote, “but there is a woe that is madness.”  Yes, Herman, I have been there with you.  At times it is so dark that I can only glimpse Poe or Lovecraft as my guides, distantly ahead.  In the twilight we find each other. Since being released from my contract with Vagabondage Pre...