K. Marvin Bruce

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 from deep within the mind, revealing aspects of the

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 turn others down.  Feel like the big guy.  I’ll just crawl bac

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 of never wearing out, however, is essential to th

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 Press, I have wrestled in the grip of depression.  I have

The internet has filled the world with noise.  Communications specialists tell us that it is important to distinguish signal from noise since signal is potentially useful information.  Ah, but the internet is so vast!  SETI would have more chance of finding signal in an infinite universe. So when I heard from my contracted publisher that Passion of the Titans , my first novel accepted for publication, is being released back to me, my breath caught in my throat.  Perhaps I should’ve heard the signal earlier.  Accepted last summer, it was downgraded to an ebook release this spring, and then finally cancelled. Wheat and chaff are very different from one another.  As are sheep and goats.  Signal and noise are far more ambiguous. Like Edgar Allan Poe, and probably here the likeness ends, I have read many inferior bits of literature that have engulfed public demand.  Has anybody ever tried to praise the literary merits of Fifty Shades of Grey ?  I had trouble getting myse

If you’ve ever read any of my stories, I hope that they aren’t the worst you’ve ever seen.    I know individual tastes vary, but those of fiction editors vary maybe a little too much.  Stories written specifically for certain magazines rejected.  The word “subjective” always  slathered on like burn ointment. Sometimes I wonder about the essence of storytelling.  It has changed over time as I found out when my friend Fantasia had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school.  She complained about the overly descriptive narrative that made the plot sometimes hard to follow.  I explained how gothic it was.  Even that didn’t help. No doubt, over time, writing preferences change.  Or should I say reading preferences?  Many of us had to write descriptively in school.  When we carry it over into our fiction we find editors who don’t like our verbosity.  Flash fiction is all the rage in this internet culture of constant click-throughs.  Who has time to read a descriptive story? For

My best friend ever has gone away.  As a writer, I lead a lonely existence—often it means spending hours isolated with my thoughts.  I know that my fan-base is tiny, my voice unheard.  My best friend listened, encouraged, and provided inspiration. Recently she moved away and when I awake it is now later than my consistent 3:30 a.m., bursting with ideas.  Now I find it hard to rise by 4:00, and the ideas are like a visit to the dentist.  I want Fantasia back, but I know that can’t happen.  Where does the forlorn writer go to find inspiration? Like Willy Wonka, my work lately has been suffering.  I limit myself to editing since new ideas just can’t be conjured.  Writing means that free time is largely spent alone—not the best way to make friends.  I certainly don’t influence people.  Yet, I can’t stop trying. Writing, as rational and heady as it is, is a matter of feeling.  I try to express my complex and troubling emotions in words and images, often heavily allegoric

I received a very nice rejection letter today.  The editor had nothing but nice things to say about my story.  Oh, and, I won’t be publishing it.  By my count, that makes thirty different literary magazines (some more literary than others) that have rejected my work.  The unnamed editor advised me to try simultaneous submissions because publication is a “numbers game.” Perhaps my skin is too thin to be a writer.  I think about writing all day long.  As soon as I wake up—literally.  I’m writing before five minutes have passed from eye-opening.  On my way to work (sometimes at work), on my way home from work.  As I drift off to sleep, I am thinking about my stories.  It is, in brief, my life. I read a lot too.  Some of what I read is shit.  I try to refrain from harsh words, but some people succeed in writing who should be condemned to the slush pile hell I inhabit most of the time.  I get enough encouraging rejections not to jump off the bridge just yet, still, why can’t they

The folks at Danse Macabre are most accommodating.  I’m pleased to announce the appearance of my latest short story, “Circumstance of Victims,” In Danse Macabre 72, Oubliette . This is an experimental piece, but, if read with patience, it makes sense.  It is also, like most fiction, somewhat autobiographical.  If you would like to learn what that means, I would encourage you to read my story.  Those who hold power over employees don’t realize just how awful that responsibility is. I’ve been alive long enough, and with a personality strong enough, to have lost a job or two.  It is never shy of anything but devastating.  The first novel I attempted (unsuccessfully) to publish was about just this.  I suspect the editors who threw it on the slush-pile had never experienced it. I sent the manuscript to my friend Sluggo to read.  S/he said that it was pretty long, but the parts about what it feels like to lose a job were spot on.  Authentic.  Compelling.  Sluggo had been ther

I used to belong to a local writer’s group.  Frustrated at my inability to figure out how to get published (I had written three novels and couldn’t get the attention of any publishers in this crowded market) I dutifully spent a Saturday a month with a group of strangers, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. One of the benefits of this group was their ability to pool the membership fees and bring in experts.  We had people from the publishing industry come and tell us about the realities of trying to get noticed in an over-crowded room.  And esoteric knowledge sometimes came our way. It was here that I learned from industry professionals that some best-selling authors no longer write their own books.  I was floored.  I write because I have to write.  It isn’t something I learned and it’s not in any sense optional.  The ideas come, unbidden, as I walk down the street.  The turns of phrase.  The slashing wit. Some Big Names (and I know the dangers of libel) bring the

A felicitous bit of unexpected delirium came my way as I received news that one of my stories had been accepted for publication in Danse Macabre .  That magazine reserves a bishop’s throne of reverence in my psyche as the first place willing to publish my efforts at finding a voice. Not exactly a neophyte at fiction—I have been writing since grade school days—publication has been an uphill forced march in an icy rain for me.  I finished my first novel last century, in 1988.  Like many first novels, it sucked.  It didn’t seem that way to me at the time. Nothing is a better assassin to good fiction than academic writing.  Trying to establish a career in higher education, I wrote a couple of dry books and some articles, always trying to up the bar a little on style and panache.  Most publishers were not amused. I was 47 years old when my first fiction piece was published.  In Danse Macabre .  It won special mention as a macabre Christmas tale, and I had long been thrilled at

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 from deep within the mind, revealing aspects

No writer really works in isolation.  Although my favorite time of writing falls daily between 3:30 and 5:00 a.m., I am not alone.  In my head are the many other writers I’ve read, and those from whom I’ve learned my penurious craft.  Today marks the birthday of Franz Kafka, one of my literary heroes. My experience of trying to find publishers has been a kafkaesque trial from time to time.  I learned to write by reading those who’ve written before—Poe, Melville, Austin, Kafka.  Their rich writing, it seems, had a place in a past that no longer exists. Something few editors appreciate is the metaphorical and ironic style of writing I employ.  Anyone who reads Moby-Dick and comes away thinking it is a novel about whaling has no subtlety whatsoever.  To write about life’s great questions, you need a vehicle.  Melville chose a whale, and Kafka chose a bug.  Today, unless your style is flashy and full of sparkly panache, you’ll remain self-published. I know some editors perso

My first story in Jersey Devil Press was about literary wish-fulfillment.  The idea was that, if someone loved literature enough, it would literally come alive whenever a book was opened.  As someone who has always wanted to have a published novel, this was the most guilty pleasure I could imagine. For those of us who write, everyday reality can often be painful.  We work jobs whose sole objective, on most days, seems to be to crush the very creativity from us.  I awake inspired every morning, and return from work each day completely emptied and dispirited.  Life, but not as we know it. “Literary Ops” was a story of profound hope.  Although the protagonists awake each day to various, historic world empires attempting to destroy their home (let the reader who has eyes to see understand) they may rebuff attacks by knowing just which author calms the marauding hordes.  In my dreams, life is that simple. In today’s business-driven world, there is no place for those of us who

A lifetime in higher education has taught me that connections, not authenticity, make a writer.  At least in society’s eyes.  If you can afford the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, doors will be thrown open for you.  Don’t you dare being born a nobody, though. I’ve been writing since I was a teenager, unconnected, in a small town.  My teachers praised my work but really had no experience with publishing.  Stories moldered away in a dilapidated cardboard box stuck in a ratty, unused upstairs room until the bulldozers threatened and I had to haul them away. I grew up without much.  I had an armload of books for friends and I wrote tales that no one ever read.  This kind of thing doesn’t get you a job.  In a small town with no bookstore—or even a library—I never heard of literary journals; I didn’t even hear of journals period until I got to college.  First generation.  Thoroughly confused.  Nobody has to teach you how not to know anything. All this reminds me of high school aw

The first story I actually had accepted for publication was “Hide and Seek.”  It appeared in Danse Macabre XXXIII, Erzählungen (March 2010).  Danse Macabre subsequently changed servers, and my story is no longer available there.  I’m hoping eventually to have some of my short stories republished in a collection, but first I have to get more of my short stories published period. I remember clearly the inspiration for “Hide and Seek.”  One day during lunch I’d wandered to the space around a vacant building.  It was one of those single-story, multi-purpose monstrosities with no real character or charm.  The parking lot had weeds breaking through the pavement, and the building on either side, probably built by overly optimistic speculators, also stood vacant.  It was rather peaceful. Having been a writer since a very young age, I habitually carry either paper or a notebook in my pocket.  I found a bench with chipping paint, sat down, pulled out my paper, and began to wri

Vardøger, the title of my story published in Danse Macabre XLVI, Morgenblätter (May 2011), is based on an actual phenomenon.  The word itself is Norwegian for that experience of hearing someone arrive before they actually do.  It is common, and bizarre. There was an alley between our house and the next, through which we had to drive to park our car.  Since the alley was shared by the neighbors, we quickly learned the signature sound of each make of car.  You could tell who was home based on which car trundled up between the buildings. When my wife shopped for groceries, I helped carry them inside.  Naturally, on the days she went to the store, I kept an ear out for our car in the alley.  More than once I’ve dashed to the door after hearing her pull in, only to find no car there.  The sound seemed real enough; I’d never thought to try to record it since it is a daily sound.  Every once in a while, however, it was Vardøger. Folk tradition—a rich source for fiction ideas,

Some years back, I remember, there was not inconsiderable clamor over J. K. Rowling’s confession that Professor Dumbledore was gay.  Having been teethed on po-mo fare, this struck me as very odd indeed.  Yes, Rowling had invented the character, but he was dead by the end of Harry Potter’s series, and his sexual orientation seemed a moot point. Having written a few novels myself (don’t run to the bookstore, fantasy readers, for only one has been accepted for publication), I know how attached writers grow to their characters.  We are their gods, creating them, nurturing them, punishing and sometimes killing them.  We know them better than anyone.  Or do we? Every thought takes on a life of its own.  Writers think worlds into being.  The problem with thinking worlds into being is not dissimilar from being a parent.  You bring a new creature into life, but that child has a life of her own.  You can only make decisions up to a point. So it is with fictional people.  We w

Sometime back in the Nixon administration, I began writing my first fiction.  Although I had vague thoughts of publishing it, I had no idea what would be involved or that it would take me nearly forty years to accomplish it.  Writing is for those who have a very long view. I began by writing short stories.  A few were published in my high school newspaper, but since I was the editor that probably doesn’t count.  Teachers encouraged me to get published for real, although they didn’t really know how either.  Living in a small town you can still dream big.  It’s just a bit more difficult to pull it off. Danse Macabre is a great online magazine.  I submitted a macabre Christmas tale, “O Tannenbaum,” that won the 2009 prix d’écriture de Noël in Fiction.  The story was subsequently removed from the web when Danse Macabre changed servers, but it has a special place in my heart as the first piece someone other than myself considered worthy of publication. Don’t get me wro

Even as my latest rejection letter arrives, I’m finishing up my fifth novel.  I have this sneaking suspicion that editors just don’t get me.  I’ve written (almost) five complete novels and only Vagabondage Press has given an inkling of encouragement. Well, it may be that my writing sucks.  I’m willing to admit that as a possibility.  The problem is everyone from high school English teachers to professional writers say the opposite.  The editors, however, hold the keys. My next novel is about the gods.  When Neil Gaiman writes a novel about gods it becomes a best seller.  I’ve spent a lifetime studying gods.  When I write such a novel, I’ll have a hard time getting a publisher even to open the email.  I won’t stop trying, though.  To be a writer, you’ve got to take the reins. Those of us who write, do so because of who we are.  Those who get paid for their work are lucky, at first.  To be a writer “successfully” means writing what publishers are willing to buy.  Looking at

Persistence.  A great concept, but a harsh lover.  Writing is a delicate creature, easily crushed by changes in its preferred ecosystem.  I’ve been reminded of this ever since the dreadful event that I entitle the annual time displacement. Daylight savings time had a practical origin in an agricultural lifetime.  Of course, our society has changed radically since then—so much so that there would be no harm in staying on daylight savings time all year long.  To creatures of habit that one extra hour’s sleep in the fall doesn’t compare with the hideous, persistent weeks of uncontrollable yawns in the spring. I’m an early morning writer.  Since I’m not one of the privileged few who gets paid for my efforts, writing has always been an avocation.  Avocations are not viewed favorably by employers, so they are pursuits of personal time.  I think most clearly in the hours before dawn that I jealously guard from others.  I do not want to share my 4 a.m. with anyone but my imagin

I’ve been talking to my friend Steve about rejection.  You see, the constant stream of rejection letters for someone trying his damnedest to be heard is felt by both editors and authors.  Mostly authors. Steve has a blog, Sects and Violence in the Ancient World , that used to get nearly a thousand hits a day.  Now he barely gets a hundred.  Perhaps the world of the internet has already grown weary of what he has to say. For my part, every few months I get brave and lob three or four stories to literary magazines and sit back to wait for the rejection letters to roll in.  I’ve had six short stories published.  All but two were first rejected before someone else saw a little value or entertainment in them. I’m told that writers must have thick skin.  I also know that I put an awful lot of myself into my stories.  Yes, rejection is personal.  It can be nothing else. Even Vagabondage Press, who will be publishing my Passion of the Titans novel this fall, emailed to say i

Now that January’s come, and nearly gone, we know the Mayan calendar was wrong.  Not to worry—this is something that any writer knows—the end of the story hasn’t been written yet. I’ve been writing for decades now.  One of the earliest lessons I learned, once I’d turned from short stories to novels (I’ve written several, but The Passion of the Titans is the first to interest a publisher), is that writers are near-sighted.  Oh, I’m not denying that there are visionaries out there, but when I write, I may have a plan for my characters that is never realized.  Like in life, unseen circumstances intervene.  Some writers, I’ve been told, sketch out the storyline ahead of time and know just what is going to happen. Like the Mayan, however, they might be surprised.  At least I am.  I start a novel with an end in mind: my personal 2012.  That end suggests a beginning, for there’s a story here to be told.  The means of getting from the beginning to the end are unpredictable.  W