Tag: ROKon Magazine

Idle Musing About The Past

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I’m of the age where I find myself reflecting on the past a lot. In fact, I’ve pretty much been on pause for half a decade, if not longer. I did, in fact, do something interesting about 10 years ago. I, along with a young woman named Annie Shapiro, started a magazine for expats in Seoul called ROKon Magazine.

It’s a long, convoluted and tragic story you can read about at length there — > Somehow

It’s about 30,000 more words than you want to know about me. But I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs test and I’m 100% extroverted, so I would rather anyone interested in me read it and understand my background than not know about it and be shocked.

Annie and I had a weird, difficult relationship and she now, tragically no long with us. I always thought she and I would reconcile, but we never did. It’s all very boring to me now, but if you’re in the media business, if you can get past the narcissistic drunklog nature of it, Somehow is worth a little bit of your time. I did some pretty shitty stuff to Annie in Korea and I regret it. I’m a completely different person now. Totally different. It’s like I got a brain transplant.

Anyway, it was a long time ago and no one cares anymore. I’m just in writing mood and am struggling to figure out what I’m going to write about tonight before I go to bed.

The Struggle Is Real Redux, Yet More Mulling A Novel

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am now struggling directly to tell the story of the high concept speculative fiction satire I’ve come up with and the specific story of ROKon Magazine. The only reason why ROKon Magazine’s story is important is, well, it’s the only plot I have.

So, I don’t know. I know the more I tell the ROKon Magazine story literally, the easier it is to write the novel. But the more I do that, the more muddled the high concept aspect of the novel becomes. So, there is a balance I have to strike.

But I am really passionate about both aspects of the story, so I am willing to do the work needed to integrate them. It is going to take a while, though. It is going to require some real fancy footwork writing-wise on my part.

The Struggle Is Real: Writing A Novel Is Hard

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I find myself looking at my blank page, struggling to write an outline. I know the general story I want to tell, but the individual scenes are difficult. I have stumbled across a pretty good system for writing an outline — I do it in longhand with a Sharpie — so it’s just a matter, really, of taking the risks needed to get the story down.

As I have written before, I have pretty much only one plot to my name. The rise, and fall, and rise of the magazine I started 10 years ago with a young lady named Annie Shapiro. It has taken me about 10 years to figure out that I probably can’t literally tell the story of the magazine.

But we’ll see. It seems the closer to get to telling the literal story of ROKon Magazine, the easier it will be to tell the story overall. But I have to give it all a huge amount of thought. I have to figure out how to take something that happened on a very small scale and how to make it huge and epic so people will be interested.

It is going to take a lot of thinking, regardless.