Tag: ROKon Magazine

V-Log: The Influence Of My Life In Seoul As An Expat On The Novel I’m Developing

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Some thoughts.

I Was ‘Famous’ Once, And Young

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I only write this out of extreme boredom and a love of writing, but let’s talk about that one, brief moment in time when I was “famous.” Andy Warhol famously quipped that in the future we’d all be famous for 15 minutes, so I guess those few months in 2006-2007 in Seoul were it for me.

I’m now doomed to shuffle off this mortal plain in relative obscurity.

But back then, I was a man on fire. I was DJing at the best expat bar in Seoul and was the publisher of the only monthly expat magazine. Really, I was only really all that cool for, maybe, a month. I think it was December. That one month in 2006, to date, has been the apex of my life to date.

Sadly, I wasn’t really even that happy at the time. I was obsessing over not only the magazine I was struggling to run, ROKon Magazine, but a young lady named Annie Shapiro as well. And I was quickly becoming overwhelmed at my DJ gig. So, if you really wanted to get all nitty-gritty about it, I’d say Christmas Eve, 2006 was it. That was the moment in time when I about as good as my life has gotten to date.

I learned a lot about what it’s like to be famous — or notorious — during those brief months. I learned if you’re famous, even in an extremely small pond like Seoul’s expat scene, people not only feel they have a vested interest in everything you do and say, they can eat you alive if you aren’t careful.

That’s why I know should I ever truly become “famous” — and the way things are going right now, I definitely never will — I will zoom from zero to hero back to zero in record time. I’m just too different and outspoken in a weird way for me not to offend entire swaths of the American populace.

But even to propose such a thing at this point is delusional in the extreme. I’m a nobody and always will be the way things are going. I just like to write, even though to date I don’t really write that well relative to the people I would be competing against for jobs I might be interested in. I’m self-indulgent, narcissistic and self-involved as this very post proves. I keep thinking I can figure out some easy, quick fix that will get me out of this horrible situation I’ve found myself in since I came back from South Korea the last time, but, alas, it’s not to be.

I have some structural problems in my life that can only be fixed through hard work, money and lots and lots of luck combined with time. Even under the best of circumstances I’ll be 50 years old before I dig myself out of this hole I’m in and by that time I can’t very well bang hot 24 year olds without being really, really, creepy. (Not that I can do it now, but you live in your delusional world and I’ll live in mine.)

So, here I am.

I barely have enough food to last me until I can get more, don’t have enough gas to do anything that is otherwise free and my life is at a complete standstill. I need to face my fears and get back to working on my novel. It may not make me famous, but it at least will give me hope.

And that, as of right now, is in short supply.

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.