K. Marvin Bruce

it, and part of me feels utterly like an ass.  Like a poser.  A wannabe.  Only professionals have agents, right? I’ve been writing since I was a tween.  Living in a small town with parents who’d never gone to college, and a mother who never finished high school, I had no idea how to get published.  I discovered that by editing my high school paper I could publish my own stories, but that felt like cheating. In my days of formal schooling, publication became purely academic.  Serious scholars published serious papers.  I tried to have some of my poetry published in my college literary magazine, but the editors said it was too depressing. Although I’ve been writing fiction since the 1970’s, I didn’t start trying to publish it until 2009.  I was scared and unsure of myself.  My first publication won a small prize, and a subsequent story won a more competitive recognition.  Those who publish books, however, were less kind. I tried to find an agent.  Young—well, not really

If you’re like most working writers, finding time to practice the craft is a major issue.  Between working and commuting and eating breakfast before and supper after work, about 19 hours of the day are taken up.  Not much time left for writing (or sleeping). Many years ago I realized that if I was going to get any writing done I’d have to get up pretty damned early.  Most days that’s just before 3:30 a.m.  I try to write while eating breakfast.  Ideas come like a furious January snowstorm, but most remain scribbles in my notebook.  When does a writer have time to write? When I was young I had plenty of ideas for stories.  I read constantly, and when I wasn’t reading or watching television, I was writing.  It wasn’t until college, though, that it became an obsession.  After my master’s degree, working in a retail chain, I spent my time off work writing a novel. After I got married and time after work was occupied with other things, I started writing at work.  My employer di

Transformation.  It’s an idea older than the mythological Greeks.  It seems that people everywhere have wondered what it would be like to be something else.  It’s also a staple of fantasy literature. I recently read The Lizard Princess by Tod Davies.  It is a heavily symbolic work, and one that makes the reader think.  Nothing can be assumed in this world.  Even death is not what it seems to be. Fantasy novels rely on a willing suspension of belief.  It is difficult to read such stories with a critical eye and enjoy them.  Ironically, I found George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones difficult to get into.  The writing is what I call “power writing”—full of bravado and flash.  A fantasy, it seems to me, should have a certain gentleness to the narrative. I’ve occasionally presented Boeotian Rhapsody, my Medusa novel, to publishers as a fantasy.  It really isn’t.  Magical realism, perhaps.  Fabulism maybe.  Weird fiction writ long.  It is fantasy in that it could never happen,

Six unpublished novels sit before me on my laptop.  Okay, to be fair the first one is the “throw away” that all novelist wannabes have to write.  Probably the second one, too, if I’m to be entirely honest.  Novel four wasn’t that great, being a Nanowrimo effort.  The other three, however, I like. It’s a funny thing, how writers feel about their children.  Unlike our biological offspring, we are told to drown our darlings and make them suffer.  That applies to works as well as characters.  We are advised to throw away our first ten-thousand hours of work. Well, maybe not throw them away completely.  Experts—and we all have to respect experts—claim that it takes ten-thousand hours of doing anything artistic to become proficient.  That’s over two years of waking time completely devoted to the craft.  Most of us can’t afford more than a few hours of writing a week. It’s difficult to know how to measure success in writing.  Getting published is a hurdle.  With my six novels—eas

Writing is an activity with implications.  Many of us jot things down on a regular basis—reminders, tweets, stories, dissertations; people are frequently writing.  While letter writing may not be the practice that it used to be (although some of us still regularly write and mail letters) we know that the sacred code is that what we put in that envelope is private.  It is, guaranteed by the government, our own business.  That’s what makes a recent story of a trove of undelivered letters such an interesting tale. The postmasters of The Hague in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, kept a truck of undelivered mail.  Now academics are using high tech scanning devices to read the letters without opening them.  You can’t slander the dead. I do wonder, however, about private words.  Most of what we write on our computers, I suspect, will simply vanish some day.  Internet fame seems like it must be temporary.  Still, writing reveals quite a lot when it’s found.  Perhap

As an erstwhile professor, I used to research and write academic papers.  As a professor outside the academy, I no longer have the opportunity.  My day job, however, takes me occasionally into the hallowed halls and I start to feel a little lonely for the academic publishing world. Sure, the papers are boring and read by maybe a dozen people, but I never had the difficulty of getting them published that I do with my fiction.  My non-pseudo-nym was fairly well known among colleagues and they knew, as a friend once said, “the author is as important as the story.”  In the fiction realm, I’m nobody. Recently I met with many professors.  The experience divided my loyalties.  Before meeting with them I had been making good progress on my latest K. Marvin Bruce project.  Since meeting with them I’ve been brooding over whether to try more academical writing.  So boring.  So dull.  Yet, I can get it published. It sort of makes me wonder what’s wrong with the fiction-publishers’ wor

Sometimes I fear my imagination might run out.  Throughout my life it has been my experience that good things tend to run out while bad things seem to exist in amazing reserves.  Imagination is a good thing. Part of the problem, admittedly, is the ubiquity of work.  Trudging back and forth to the office each day drains a writer of energy.  At least this writer.  When I’m in the midst of a big project (as one of the six novels I’ve finished) I’m full of ideas, ready to write constantly.  When I finish, I can go months groping about for an idea that works.  Meanwhile I work. I was glad to read Tod Davies’ The Lizard Princess because it takes place in a fantasy land of ideas.  Although I’ve termed some of my stories fantasies, the fact is I don’t really write in this genre.  I think “magical realism” might be the more appropriate way to describe my work, or “fabulism.”  Genres can be constraining. The Lizard Princess makes no apologies for being fantasy.  The usual tropes o

My writing partner Elizabeth and I like to talk about characters.  In some of my stories the characters are only vaguely defined.  To me, that is one of the aspects of short stories.  Did Poe know or care where Roderick  Usher went to college?  What kind of tree the raven's nest was in?  Somehow I doubt it. Still, getting a clear idea of character helps a story immensely.  One of the most basic aspects of character is desire.  We all want something.  If a character doesn't want anything no pitfalls will come on the way to her or his goals. The character's world will be dull and meandering. If there is one thing you must know about your characters, it is what do they want? I've read books where the author clearly doesn't know what the character desires.  The story can unfold and interesting, titillating events can transpire.  You can even feel for the losses or injuries the protagonist bears.  But you can't identify fully with them.  You don't kn

The old adage says, "don't judge a book by its cover."  In actual fact, you can tell quite a bit by even a glimpse at the cover of a book.  Publishers put quite extensive resources into getting the cover right because people do, and should, consider the cover. First of all, a cover can tell you whether a book is serious or not.  Even as fiction writers, we want people to know whether our work is deadly serious or light-hearted.  The cover is the first clue. Book covers can also tell you if the publisher knows what they are doing or not.  Many self-published books are evident by their covers.  Others tell you that the publisher doesn't understand the intended readership. Consider a book, fiction or non, that has an actual person's face on it.  Often this is not a strong selling point.  Some biographies do this, and that may be the one case where a good subject photo works for the cover.  A poor one, however, can put readers off.  I once bought a

I have friends who are writers.  Almost all of them have other jobs, and most of them aren’t published.  Writing, however, is what drives them.  You can tell that about a writer. Our society has condemned itself over and over again, and one of the ways in which it continues to do so is by blocking writers from publication.  Even many of those “successful” in the art will say it was a matter of luck.  They found the right person at the right time in a threadbare saga that nobody would publish these days. Meanwhile, our society makes it increasingly difficult to get published and the real writers muddle through careers that are, in reality, just jobs. I’m not talking about weekend warriors here—people who write on the spur of the moment and try to get attention for it.  Writing is living for writers.  People who have the immediate response of “I should write about that” to even the most mundane thing that can be made extraordinary with words.  I applaud all the writers who k

Writers can be suspicious people.  I am related to a somewhat famous author.  He won’t talk about writing and never offers to give any help.  I figured it was just a personality trait. You see, I’m a pretty open and honest guy.  Well, as much as a writer can be.  I’m glad to talk about writing and share the paltry bit I know.  Thus I started this blog.  I’m finding that not many others share this trait with me. I knew an editor who was younger than me.  I’m not exactly wet behind the ears, I have to admit.  So this younger editor was, I suppose, a little suspicious of this older guy who contacted him out of the blue.  Still, he took my card and said he’d be in touch. Deep down I suspected he might be a writer.  I have no idea what he thought of me.  After he left his company to go off on his own, I contacted him and asked if he’d like to talk about writing.  Silence.  Not a word. You have to understand that I’m an introvert.  Pushy is about the last adjective anyone co

I seldom get sick.  I’ve been told this is one of the boons of middle age—the maladies of childhood pass and it take more to bring you down.  A swift-moving bug, however, recently caught me and kept me awake all night thinking the end had come. Ironically, I associate being sick with writing.  I was  a sickly child.  Skinny and frail I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and actually missed a large portion of seventh grade because of recurring bouts of illness.  I attempted to write my first novel in such a febrile state. A science-fiction fan, I began scrawling about a ship at sea attached by some weird creature.  My novel didn’t have much of a plot and my skills were, well, juvenile.  A couple more false starts accompanied me through high school, but few people beyond my two closest friends, knew I wrote. Of course, I don’t have to be sick to write.  In this workaday world, however, a brief illness affords an opportunity to write during the middle of the day wh

With a shock I realized it had been months since the last time.  Months!  I write every day, and yet I hadn’t submitted anything for publication since the spring.  I had several stories ready to go, and although my skin is getting more reptilian, each rejection still hurts (nobody’s allowed to say that, by the way). A couple weeks back, then, I took three stories that have been gathering electronic dust, and sent them out.  The first, a prose riff on Whitman called, “O Driver, My Driver,” was turned down by a journal that had published me twice before.  I’m incredibly busy so I just took the pain and went to work. A decided to send it out again—it really is a good story.  I will discuss it more, once it’s published.  That’s why I started this blog.  Long ago a friend warned me not to try to publish fiction on a blog.  Of course, some people do, and become best sellers. Did I say it’s going to be published?  Oh yes, thank you Exterminating Angel Press!   Despite f

Movies are stories.  Of course, many movies are based on the work of writers in the form of novels or, sometimes, short stories.  Borrowing the plot, a director and screenwriter take over and retell the story visually.  Often the original written form is better. Serial television shows are the same.  Since writers of television programs can’t know season-by-season whether their program will be renewed, it has to be, almost by definition, open-ended.  When a new season begins a character may have shifted or become someone else, and we, the viewers must play along. My current television story is Sleepy Hollow .  It is very different, of course, than the tale written by Washington Irving.  By the end of season one, even, it was clear that the writers had changed their minds as to who some of the characters were.  Henry Parrish was not originally the horseman of war. I have no way of knowing that, but as a writer I can sense it.  As I sit down to write out a story, I seldom ha

There is, I’m told, a natural progression to dating.  If a girl doesn’t like you on the first date, it’s over.  A second date is a hopeful sign and, barring unforeseen circumstances, a third date is likely. Don’t take my word for it.  I was never a proficient dater, and the girl I married was one I never dated.  My first girlfriend entangled me in a tragic relationship that strung over two years and came to define my senior year in college. No, this isn’t a dating advice column—you wouldn’t want to read one by me!  It’s a metaphor.  You see, I used to think getting published was like dating.  Once you found an editor who “got” what you were doing, you’d be able to move forward.  Progress. I think of H. P. Lovecraft, who is now being taught at universities, and how he really only found one magazine that liked his work.  I thought maybe I’d found that magazine in Danse Macabre , but then they started to be less-than-enthusiastic about my work. It takes a lot of courage f

My writing partner Elizabeth has started a writing club in her local community.  I am really thrilled, since having others to share the enthusiasm for the craft is one of the most fulfilling aspects of life that I can imagine.  Talking with fellow writers has been my panacea and placebo for many years. In a pique over my own lack of progress, I followed up on the many places where I’ve submitted material and have heard nothing in return.  Perhaps a dozen literary magazines regularly reply when you submit something.  The rest will just leave you wondering. As I was crawling over websites looking for any evidence that my submissions might still be alive, it occurred to me that I write for myself.  As another friend once said, we write what we can’t find anybody else writing.  I do it knowing that most of it will never be published. There is a difference between writing for personal fulfillment and writing for publication.   My writing is hard to classify.  I sometimes ca

The mind of a writer is a restless place.  Trying my hardest, it’s difficult to shut it down.  I imagine other writers are the same.  Good writing, as I’ve heard, is clear thinking. On the other hand I have a Protestant work ethic that would make even Calvin blush.  If I’m given a task to do, I work assiduously until it is done.  Bosses often mistake this for efficiency. The problem is I’ve generally been employed below my ability level.  That’s not to say that there aren’t busy times at work—there are.  Some times I can’t finish what I need to, no matter how hard I work.  Other times, however, there’s nothing to do. Here’s my dilemma—should I write when there’s no work to do?  Well, that isn’t really a question.  Life is lamentably short; we have a few years and then we’re gone.  Too many of those years are claimed by work.  Much of it is busy-work. In my current employment I’ve been going weeks without much to do.  I want to keep my job.  I’m making my goals.