K. Marvin Bruce

What makes a story scary?  I suspect that the answer depends on the asker.  You see, I think of my stories as scary.  Whether other people do, I don’t know. When I look for a scary story I’m not looking for gore.  Properly speaking, I’m not looking for fear either.  Mood, creepiness, and the strange are far more appealing.  Frisson at the atmosphere.  Poe, I suspect, isn’t too scary these days.  He knew how to set a mood, though. I recently read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”  I’ve heard a lot about this story and since it is still under copyright I had to find a book that contained it.  It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. Don’t take me wrong—I am a fan of Shirley Jackson.  She was able to deliver as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle show.  “The Lottery,” however, didn’t scare me.  It was interesting, a nice short story, but not fearful. I find my hackles rising...

Ten percent, in the context of the Bible, is a tithe.  The old laws say that you owe God ten percent of your income.  Some religious people today still pay it. I was reading an article recently that featured another ten percent.  This applied to writers.  Although an unscientific survey—including information from Duotrope—this article suggested the acceptance rate of fiction writers is ten percent. That means, and I’m no math guy, that a piece has to be submitted an average of ten times before it is accepted somewhere.  This helps explain, but not assuage, my lack of success when it comes to getting published.  It’s normal. This has been on my mind lately since  Interview with the Gorgon  is getting more than ripe.  I stopped trying to find publishers some five years ago when it was under contract with Vagabondage Press.  They took a long time killing it—with no kill fee—leaving me in ...

How many novels must one man write, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, before you can call him an author?  I’ve completed six, none published, and I’ve got another well under way.  My business card, however, nowhere indicates that I’m an author. Being a writer is more than an occupation.  It’s an identity.  Like the vast majority of writers, I work for a living.  Long hours.  Long commute.  Heavy eyelids.  Sloped shoulders.  Weary sighs.  My boss thinks of me as an employee.  I think of myself as a writer gathering information. For me, there’s an ethics about it all.  I spend a lot of time reading.  Years, if I add up all the hours.  Am I not morally required to give something back?  I’ve written, sweated over, edited, and polished my novels.  Yet they sit on my hard drive seen by my eyes only and the even harder eyes of alabaster editors. Such is a writer’s life.  I’m not really looking for th...

“The Last Train from New York” is a story I wrote while working for a New York publisher.  Being unemployed was on my mind, and the story is a metaphor for a loser trying to find his place.  This past week I heard the glad news that “The Last Train from New York” has been accepted for publication in Corvus Review .  This makes eighteen stories published, and also marks another literary magazine that seems to think I’m capable. That may sound gratuitous on my part, but I assure you it's not.  Like many writers I suffer from lack of self-esteem.  All the advice givers say to take rejection lightly, but as someone who puts a lot of effort into each piece I decide to send out, how can I not take rejection personally?  When I do get a hit, it makes my day.  Week, even. Only a writer understands how publication is validation.  Someone who has a louder voice than me—a longer reach—says yes, this guy has something interesting to say.  Pa...

Keeping to a schedule, I’ve always found, helps me to remain steady in my writing.  A creature of the early morning, I awake when the majority in my time zone slumber, and try to capture my thoughts with this net call literacy.  I try to do it daily, but the desire to sleep is great, and weekends invariably find me cheating. Then there’s travel.  Even fictional people need vacation.  Indeed, travel is one of the greatest sources of literary inspiration.  Seeing something out of the ordinary, talking to people you seldom see, throwing your concept of morning and night off by several hours.  These things can be an alternate form of consciousness. I try to blog on schedule.  This, as most of my literary endeavors, is subject to a kind of profound failure at times.  Life gets in the way—wonderfully in the way—of writing.  It is always my hope, though, that at the end of it all, I’ll be able to scribble it all down. My current t...

Unless you’re sexy, or already well-connected, the internet feels like high school all over again.  You want to be noticed, but you’re insecure, a bit shy, and lacking self-confidence.  You try putting yourself out there only to be rejected, and you crawl back into your book, where you feel safe. You’d think that the trauma, after all these years, might diminish a little.  Maybe it does for some people.  My career has turned into a train wreck and my efforts as a fiction writer haven’t exactly been welcomed with open arms.  But, I understand, one must build a platform. I have another life on the internet.  One where I don’t use a pen name.  In that internet world, where I’ve actually published two non-fiction books, nobody pays me much mind.  I’ve got a blog, a Twitter account, and a Goodreads account.  I tried to grow my Twitter following, and it has been very slow going. As K. Marvin Bruce, I also have this blog and a Twi...

In a recent conversation my friend Steve mentioned a disturbing editorial board meeting.  I’ve mentioned Steve before—he’s an editor at an academic press in New York.  What made this meeting disturbing, he said, was that editors had already decided what a writer’s style was, based on a previous book. Writing style, in my experience, is fluid.  I have written non-fiction books that are, frankly, boring.  That’s what I’d learned the academic presses wanted.  As a writer, however, I can produce pieces of a totally different style.  Who’s to say what kind of writer I am? This disturbs me because editors are the fundamental gatekeepers of the publishing industry.  And they don’t understand writing.  There was a time when editors were writers.  Now they’re business men and women.  I wonder how many of them read for pleasure. Type-casting used to be something actors feared.  I fear it too, I guess, as a writer.  If ...