K. Marvin Bruce

Life is plenty complicated without writing.   Life’s impossible without writing. You see, I’ve got tons of fiction here.   Well, it be tons if I printed it out.   I’ve been writing every day for decades now.   Long past the limit Neal Stephenson once told me, the 100,000 words you throw out before calling yourself a writer.   The problem is, life’s complicated. I happened into a New York City bookstore.   On the same shelf paperbacks by the aforementioned Neal and Robert Repino.   I know them both.   I returned home and fired up the laptop.   Hundreds of stories.   Half a dozen novels.   Amid all of this, just one story of mine that one small journal thought was worthy of actual ink.   It won third place in a contest. There’s no way to count pre-computer writing.   I was born before the advent of the household CPU.   Before electronic calculators.   We thought the TI-30 was a big deal,...

As I sit here lingering on the edge of self-publishing, I decided to read an improbable novel recommended to me by my friend Steve.  Robert Repino’s Mort(e) is an apocalyptic tale about a cat whose single-minded purpose leads to a poignant conclusion.  I won’t spoil it for you; I’m a professional. I’m always encouraged to see madcap novels published.  The Medusa novel I have out with about six publishers at the moment is bat-shit funny.  It is also intelligent, and maybe that’s my problem. I know editors, and they are fallible people.  They have sins just like the rest of us.  Their deadly sin, it seems, is not being able to see the potential in a story that’s clearly got it.  Repino, according to Steve, had a tough time finding a publisher for what is clearly a brilliant novel.  His story gives me hope. It might just be easiest to give up, but when I think this I realize that publishers are starved for good content.  To get to ...