by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I sometimes write about my failed magazine I had in Seoul, ROKon Magazine. It was a success until it wasn’t. My version of it lasted from August 2006 to April 2007. It was a very wild ride with amazing twists and turns and extremely colorful characters floating in and out of the story repeatedly.
I learned a lot from that experience in no small part because I was also DJing at a bar called Nori at the time. And, in a sense, I’m using all those experiences from a failed magazine in Seoul to write six novels set in a totally different place. But that’s not the point of this post.
The point is — learned a lot about myself as part of that particular adventure. I learned what a quirky life I lead on an existential basis. I learned that I have a lot of vision and need a partner who is persuasive to actually get anything done. But I also learned that much of life is simply picking a direction, any direction and sticking to it.
The moment you have a vision in your head, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune come out. People will bombard you with all kinds of reasons for why your vision is wrong or how much you suck or why you shouldn’t even be doing what you’re doing in the first place.
In that respect, working on writing project with an imagined six novels to it is a lot like growing ROKon Magazine back in the day. I know my “true north” and I know what these six novels to be like, no matter how many different people try to make me feel bad about even doing anything to begin with .
I’m really good at the “vision thing,” but very bad at persuasion. That’s why in the early days of ROKon Magazine the late Annie Shapiro and I made such a great team. I came up with the vision and she convinced people to help us. But I’m all alone now and it’s going to be a massive accomplishment on my part to get a literary agent to take me seriously enough to help me get this first novel published.
But here I am. Hoping to try to be in a position around the fall of 2023 where I can sell a novel. I’m still smarting over how long post-production might be if I manage to make that dream come true. But those are the breaks. I just have to accept that I have to be patient.
