Author Archives: KM Scott

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About KM Scott

A catchall of everything that manages to make it past the barrier of my skull and onto this blog.

Like Pulling Teeth. Out of my Scalp.

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Figuring out my audience while writing a young reader’s book.

It was earlier in the year when I had the inspiration.  My work as a kindergarten teacher in a hagwon gave me the idea for a book series featuring heroic princesses in action-packed adventures written for kids. Excited about the idea, I shared it with my students (all between the ages of 7 and 8), and banged out an excerpt of the story with drawings to give to them as birthday gifts.

At some point – I cannot recall when – it occurred to me to make the thing bigger.  To go from a six page excerpt to a completed work wasn’t good enough.  Now, the dream had expanded: I wanted to bring the plights of my heroines into the world of young readers.  The method?  Self-publishing.  The resources?  My laptop, Lulu.com, and an artist commissioned to do the illustrations.  All that left was the story!

Hm. The story.  Well, the story pretty much wrote itself – good guys (gals) vs. bad guys (a woman with a machine gun, air superiority, and an extremely anti-social attitude).  The problem was that, for some reason, I decided to write for a new audience.  So now, my quest is to write my story for a nebulous, hard-to-define, kinda cloudy group of readers somewhere between the ages of 8 and 13.

It’s not an easy task.  I’ve always found it easier to figure out my taxes than to figure out my audience.  When my focus was narrowed to kindy kids who were learning English, things were relatively simpler:  if I wanted to use a word longer than three syllables, I instead put in a substitution a smaller word or phrase that meant the same thing.  I even intended to put a glossary* in the back for certain words, with the intent of hopefully helping ESL students expand their vocabulary.

Writing for this older group of readers is a different story as itt’s a group that I’m unfamiliar with.  I was 8-to-13 years old myself once, but it was only for a couple years back in the early 80s.  At 38, I feel that I’ve moved on since, and as such I don’t quite remember how challenging reading was.  Heck, I was a good reader; it was never really a challenge for me – just boring.  I was a movie fan.  So, when it came to all the books you were supposed to read from 8-13, I never bothered.  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Lizard Music, Old Yeller, Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret, The Anarchists Cookbook, and so on, never had an impact on me.

That’s what this blog is about.  I’m pretty much going to have to figure out how my new audience works. How complex should the vocabulary be?  How much detail should I use when establishing background, character, settings? Should I concern myself with whether boys will like reading a book where the protagonists are all young women?

Now, I’m not going to pretend that readers are going to be clamoring for this thing-– it’s really just a personal project I’d like to see done before my students graduate in March, so I can gift it to them as a reward for putting up with me all year.  Perhaps it’ll be a little over their ability now, but it could end up being something they could use to sharpen their reading skills later.

So, for anybody out there who’s ever struggled in trying to figure out just how to write for your readers, here’s your chance to watch as I fly face-first into such and adventure.  I’ll be glad to have you along for the ride.

* glossary: a list at the back of a book, explaining or defining difficult or unusual words and expressions used in the text

Things Your Autopsy Report Should Not Say

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And now, in the interest of public service, we present:

  • Ingested bong

  • Thought saying “Braaaaaains …”  and limping with arms outstretched in menacing manner would be a really funny way to greet a group of  jumpy zombie hunters

  • Victim blamed it all on the media; in response, the media blew up victim’s car

  • Chicken surprisingly well-versed in the use of butterfly knife

  • Pulled out nose hair (of Mr. T)

  • Idiot husband apparently thought himself some sort of freakin’ engineering genius when tinkering with gas furnace

  • Wasn’t so much the heat as it was the humidity – and the alligators

  • Rocket pack failure makes escape from sarlacc pit impossible

  • Otherwise would have had to endure another Twilight sequel

  • Doused with boiling-hot fudge, skinned alive by a barrage of peanuts, and  drowned in gallons of soft-serve ice cream during bloody coup d’état in the land of Dairy Queen

My Mannam Experience: Fun and Friendliness in SK

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by KM Scott

I was first approached by a woman in the AK Plaza shopping center in Seohyeon. She’d asked me, in broken English, if I’d like to take a survey. Not in any rush and just leisurely enjoying my day, I agreed. The questions were so simplistic in nature that they caught me off guard – in fact, they had nothing to do with retail, which is what I would have expected in such a place. Though memory fails as to the exact wording, the questions were basically about what I, as a foreigner, would like to see done differently in South Korea, such as what kind of shops or food would I like to see more of, and what kind of humor would I like to share with Koreans.

I really didn’t get it at first. The lady then showed me a pamphlet in English telling me about the group she was working for, Mannam Volunteer Association. At first glance, it looked like some kind of international goodwill organization, the kind of outfit that displayed pictures of groups of multicultural folks of all walks holding hands and smiling into the camera.

What little hair my advancing age had let remain on my head stood on end. I’d seen this type of thing before, and had once or twice been the unfortunate victim of it: some ruthlessly cheerful group of zealous wingnuts under the authority of some rightfully ridiculed religious institution trying to fatten their ranks with a silly, syrupy message about universal love or some other garbage. That, or an attempt to pull me into some kind of pyramid scheme involving selling out my friends and loved ones. This was precisely the sort of crass manipulation I expected to find at this … whatever it was I was going to.

I’m glad to say my expectations were not met.

Having spent way too many Sunday afternoons cooped up in my apartment, I decided to take a risk and see what this Mannam was all about. Some of the stuff they had advertised, such as massages, food, stand-up comedian performances, and haircuts, actually sounded quite nice, and a bargain at a 10,000 won (roughly $10 US) entry fee.

The event I actually attended turned out to be free. I was taken to a public meeting area by car after taking the subway just a few stops from my home. I was immediately greeted by many smiling Mannam representatives. Walking into the event, I saw no religious tracts, no symbols, no hucksters trying to get me to buy anything. What I did see were activities, and I participated in every one of them: face painting, archery (with sucker arrows), acupuncture (in the fingers!), even a free body massage. There was a wonderful layout of food, and I hit the spaghetti bowl at least three times. In the middle of the four-hour event, there was a great talent show, featuring a number of performers, from middle school kids doing a truly impressive acrobatic dance, to a virtuoso violin player tickling the strings to a rousing background track. There were even dance lessons as to how to do the “Gangnam Style” dance, based on the internationally omnipresent K-pop hit of the same name.

The gathering was truly multicultural. People from all over the world attended, from Bangladesh to Kyrgyzstan, and even the mysterious and inscrutable land of Ohio.

As fun as all this was, the most endearing element of all was the friendliness of the Mannam folks. The stated goal of Mannam is to be an organization that promotes world peace. While the cynic in me may blanch at that, I could not help but feel touched by the smiles, kindness, and apparent desire to help visitors have a good time. Towards the end of the event, I was guided from one activity table to the next by a tirelessly genial woman whose sweet nature seemed in no way forced or condescending. Everybody was like that.

Big, public get-togethers with strangers promoting goodwill is not the sort of thing I normally do (small conclaves with furtive, bitter individuals spurting bile at humanity is more my speed), but the affable nature and genuine pleasantness I found at this even was too much for me to ignore. Part of the reason I wrote this article is to try and help others in SK who may not really get what Mannam is to understand what waits in store for them. When I first heard about the group, I’d asked friends and co-teachers if they’d ever heard of it. None had. So I went, I experienced, and I came back alive, as well as happy. I’m writing to say that I had a great time with Mannam. If you’re looking for something to do on a Sunday, you could do far worse than head out to one of their shindigs. Check ’em out on the Internet at http://www.mannamintl.org/.

Note:  After publishing this article, I had received a number of responses insisting that Mannam International has connections to a religious organization whose practices could be considered disagreeable to others.  While I still enjoyed my experience at the event I attended, and do not wish to unfairly label the attendees or workers there, in the interest of fairness and to foster informative discourse, most of those responses have been posted below.  None of the contents of this article are meant to reflect the opinions of Mae, our editor-in-chief. 

Toys Gone By

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You know what?  Barrels.

Image

It’s amazing to me, when I think about it, how much barrels had something to do with my upbringing.  Some of the happiest times of my childhood had something to do with barrels, and I remember them fondly.  The barrel was the menacing and relentless weapon of choice of the enraged ape Donkey Kong.  It was the container of sweet, orange fluid I would drink for lunch (Little Hugs.  You know what I mean).  And it was the centerpiece of one of my most fondly remembered toys.

I loved trains as a kid, which would prove to be a rather dubious statement if you had seen the way I treated them back then: neglected, broken, and on the floor.  Regardless, they held an endless charm for me.  One of the earliest trains I remember having was a Lionel O-Scale set, and one of the features that came with it was the Barrel Loader.  This, to me, represented the point of trains:  to get something from one place to another.

What was in the barrels?  What would become of the contents when they got there?  Well, this was make-believe, so, really, it didn’t matter what was in the barrels as much as they get to where they needed to go, get offloaded, and then re-loaded onto the building for another go-round.  Barrels, after all, were good things, with good, important stuff in them.  Whatever the contents, what mattered was that the train and the loader-guy did their duty to get the barrels where they belonged.

The brilliance of the toy is in its design.  Assembly was rather simple, and as I can recall, fairly sturdy in the hands of a six-year-old.  The piece did not necessarily have to be connected to the track.  The building is adorned with a number of molded decorations, such as a coil of rope, a mallet, a flight of stairs, and even a little shack that the workman “lives” in when he’s not on the clock.  Though these may seem insignificant – particularly since everything is one uniform shade of red or brown – they really actually add to the pretend factor. The little bits of detail nestled into the “background” of a toy really fueled my imagination.

The key element that really makes the piece stand out in my memory is its playability.  The problem with toy trains and small children is that the more elaborate the train becomes, the less kid-friendly it becomes as well.  Some model trains, after all, are meant to be set up and then simply observed.  The joy for certain collectors may be in arranging tracks and scenery in new and different ways, or sculpting mountain ranges and replicating towns and such, but a child’s first instinct is to get his/her hands on the thing and actually play with it, crash it into something, and cheerfully destroy its value as a collectable.

The Lionel Barrel Loader, on the other hand, clearly says “Play with me” in a sweet-natured tone.  There’s a big ol’ lever right on the side of the thing that’s the perfect size for a child’s hands.  The barrels are loaded into the bay up top.  You then pushed the barrel down the ramp, and then, by pressing the lever, had the workman shove the barrel into a gondola car waiting on the track below.  You did this as many times as you had barrels, and then you sent the train on its way.

This was a solid-red definition of simplicity, and I’m a bit astonished how easily I could fit the operation of the thing in one small paragraph.  This is because I remember being fascinated by this operation, which I would perform over and over again. This wasn’t just an articulated piece of plastic that dropped plastic into a car made of plastic; it was a workplace, an early 20th century establishment of industry had a schedule to keep, a place where things needed to get done, so I had to hop to it!

I’m not sure what became of the model train industry.  Oftentimes I would try to indulge in my enjoyment of the hobby, only to leave the poor things sitting broken and unused time and again.  Honestly, I think Lionel, Bachmann, and the others may have gotten sick of me.  Perusing different hobby and retail websites, I rarely ever see accessories that offered the interactivity that you see with the barrel loader, log loader, et cetera.  Of course, I’m sure that there are plenty of enthusiasts who would disagree with me, and rightly so:  The train I had was not necessarily a model train, but a children’s toy.  It was meant to be touched by clumsy hands and played with.  Play with it I did.  And I shouldn’t be so quick to write off Lionel – they have a version of the product listed on their site, this one fully painted, and featuring and exterior light!

Old school as I am, I may just have to upgrade.

Things Your Autopsy Report Should Not Say

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And now, in the interest of public service, we present:

  • Gruesomely fatal but very funny Stupid Human Trick
  • Suicide by Shriner
  • Towel not as bulletproof as originally thought
  •  Called before digging, but electric company rep was real practical joker
  • “What’s this button do?”
  • Cuz Joey Sherman double-dog dared you to
  • Gored by bull market
  • Should’ve moved car out of Rip Taylor’s parking space the first time he asked
  • Forgot about the whole “Don’t jump under the combine” thing
  • Crushed by flying debris as Kool-Aid Man crashed through wall
  • Bathed cat

Things Your Autopsy Report Should Not Say

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And now, in the interest of public service, we present:

  • Thought “Cape does not enable wearer to fly” warning only applicable to those who didn’t BELIEVE!
  • Accidentally kept parents from meeting
  • Thought cost-prohibitive Sealy Posturpedic mattress could be easily substituted by considerably less expensive pile of burning debris
  • Completely misinterpreted dog’s orders on who to shoot
  • Beheaded by peasants
  • Forgot which order deathtraps in pyramid were placed
  • Too much fun
  • Told Bond entire plan
  • Showed Buddha flaws in his philosophy; subsequently beaten to death by livid Buddha
  • Tried to prove lions were ticklish
  • Superstitious cops used silver bullets

 

The stuff I see in my sleep

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A frequently updated blog about the movies my mind shows me while I’m trying to get some rest.

I have a friend. You don’t know her, so the proceeding may not strike you the same way as it did me.  I know this woman personally though, so even if you don’t find it amusing in the least, take my word for it: this story is hilarious.

It is very important to me to mention that this woman – for the sake of anonymity, let’s call her ‘Clothilde’ – would never do the things described below.  She’s one of the most independent, truthful, self-reliant people I know, safely employed in the field of IT and making more money than I could ever hope for.  Because of this, I found it odd when she unfortunately – bafflingly – popped into my head one night and made a terrible showing of herself.

The dream started out with me in some kind of stationery store when I get a call from Clothilde on my cell phone.  She was asking about places that she could vacation in that begin with “St” while on her honeymoon subsequent to her impending wedding, the news of which took me totally by surprise. When I asked her who her fiance was, she didn’t seem to be sure.  There were a lot of vague things about her wedding plans, since she only made them just to enjoy the vacation package that would follow suit.

Selecting her intended was an interesting story. Apparently, in a way that made zero sense to me after I woke up, she had managed to fake her death via simply lying in a coffin. No pulse-obscuring procedures, no means of hiding her body heat – she just lay in a coffin and played dead. She did this because she was going lose the lease to the coffin if she didn’t use it by a certain date.  She had overheard a lot of positive comments about how she looked during her viewing, so, after the ruse was over, she had decided to marry the guy who paid her nicest compliments. He was happy to proceed with the nuptials, presumably unfazed by the fact that she had faked her death. Some guys can be blinded by love, I guess.

So, cut to the day of the wedding.  It was being held at the house I grew up in.  One would have expected the ceremony to take place somewhere directly associated with Clothilde – such as, say, the house she grew up in – but this was a dream that seemed to insist that no practical logic interfere with its narrative whatsoever. I was hanging out in the basement (story of my life), which was oddly devoid of a lot of guests, and by some impetus, I decided to head upstairs and see how the wedding was going.  Why I was in the basement when the ceremony was happening just upstairs …

Surprisingly, I found Clothilde, alone, resplendent in her wedding dress – and in tears! The wedding had been cancelled due to a rainstorm.  That’s right:  the wedding was called due to inclement weather.  This would mean that all the guests, the caterers, the pastor administering the ceremony – all of these people decided to up and leave because of a storm. The storm that was happening outside, despite the fact that this was an indoor wedding.

She was heartbroken, sitting on a chair in my family’s kitchen (a rare reference to real life: my family’s kitchen is actually right above the basement).  Why she was heartbroken, I don’t know.  Her affection for the guy she was going to marry was rather questionable, seeing as how she couldn’t even bother to learn his name.  I guess she was really looking forward to that vacation.

It seems that her cleverly-plotted machinations would have all come together, except for one fatal flaw – she, or somebody, kept humming the chorus to the Hamster Dance.  It had occurred to me that that song samples Whistle Stop from Disney’s Robin Hood, which was sung by Roger Miller (he wrote King of the Road ).  I was under the impression that Miller was a county/Western artist (he was more of a novelty song writer), and if she didn’t stop singing the techno-based hamster song, someone would figure out her game, and her whole plan would unravel.  And I was right: her insistence on humming it (or somebody’s, I couldn’t tell who) resulted in a meteorological event so severe that even her anonymous groom left her with no future plans for a do-over.

Okay, now, it is important to me at this point that I remind you that I feel that this person, in reality, is noble, hard-working, and very intelligent. I have never been under the conviction that she has ever faked her own death, would marry simply for gain (and even then, just for a vacation that she could have gone on by herself), or would inadvisedly insist on singing a remix of a Disney tune that was sure to ruin her matrimonial proceedings.  It is so unlike her, in fact, that I had to share this dream knowing she’d get a kick out of reading about it.

If you’re reading this, Clothilde, then thank you for participating in my weird dream.  It was great working with you!

Things Your Autopsy Report Should Not Say

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And now, in the interest of public service, we present:

  • Hot air balloon full of heroine ruptured in stomach
  • Pioneered new sharkback riding school.  Well, tried to …
  • Lacking hammer, used skull instead
  • Heavily armed, highly unstable mime
  • Hit by body of Burl Ives going 200 mph
  • Didn’t believe offspring’s insistence that monsters were under the bed, swept there anyway
  • Dedicated self to opening up minds of inner-city high school youths to joys of reading via The Turner Diaries
  • Psychopathic cellmate serving eight consecutive life sentences for unspeakably sadistic killing spree couldn’t take joke
  • Picked at it
  • “Whack it on the nose” survival tactic only pertains to bears, never to out-of-control buses
  • Willie Tyler and Lester.  Google them.

The stuff I see in my sleep

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A frequently updated blog about the movies my mind shows me while I’m trying to get some rest.

My brain seemed to have some trouble making up its mind.  This was one of the jumpiest nocturnal narratives I’d experienced in quite some time.

I started off in the Recurring Hotel.  I call it that because I have stayed there before in other dreams.  It must be part of a chain – whenever I’ve dreamt of travelling, I’m always checked in at the Recurring.  The reasons for my staying there were unknown, and apparently outside of my concern, because there was something else on my mind, something far more worrisome, intimidating, and impending. I hadn’t been to work in a week, and was due to go in that Friday.  That day was dragging inexorably towards the present, and it hung over my head like an anvil suspended by fishing line.

Like the hotel, the theme of inevitable doom would pop into my dreams frequently. I know that there’s some big thing coming up.  I also know that I either cannot handle it, or that I can handle it, but I find doing it repulsive.  Opening night in front of a live audience is coming, but I realize I’m unprepared, don’t know my lines, or am sick of the theatre.  That kind of thing.

So, I had to go to work in a few days, which I was dreading.  I was working in a movie theater, and I did not want to go back.  My managers were strangely tolerant as I had played hooky for several days.  Inexplicably, not only had they not fired me, but they seemed eager for my return.

The whole dream was permeated with a sense of overwhelming tension and anxiety – I really did not want what was going to happen to happen.  What made it worse, however, were the delays.  Something would always crop up to distract me from my dread. For example, a friend of mine had approached me at the hotel.  She was grim and worried, asking me for help.  Her husband had downloaded and installed something in her computer, and now strange files were showing up on it.  I tried to explain that he was probably downloading the new files himself, but stopped short of making him seem like an unfaithful husband (the real-life counterpart to this couple couldn’t be happier with each other).

But enough of that! The scene suddenly jumped, I was off to the boonies of New Rome, located just beyond the west side of Columbus.

Hovering above the landscape, I was perusing a living model of the rural territory, dotted with a small neighborhood, some home businesses, a fast-food restaurant or two.  When I say ‘living model’, I mean that the things on the model were actually alive – except for the O-scale train set that circled a small house off to one side. My first introduction to Google Earth just an hour or so before hitting the sack can be thanked for that.

So then – jump – I was at the home I grew up in – another frequent occurrence – in the kitchen with my dad.  In reality my dad has sadly been gone for eight years now, but that wasn’t stopping him from making me some bacon.  I didn’t want bacon; I didn’t like bacon – in my dream.  I feel that it is of the utmost importance here that I stress the point that it was my dream-self that wanted no bacon; real-life, flesh-and-blood, corporeal KM Scott loves bacon, and if you were to have even the slightest desire to buy me bacon upon encountering me in person, you should feel free to indulge that desire in the most recklessly exuberant way you can manage.

So dad was making me breakfast, including bacon, and my world was blinking in and out. The schizoid editor of this nighttime head movie had apparently tired of jarring jumps between settings, and decided it would be more fun to quick-cut between the eerily mundane and the chillingly dark.  Blink and I’m in the house, only this time without my dad.  The narrative had switched to a horror film where I was being menaced by a current coworker who was actually some kind of conscious zombie.

Blink again and I’m back in the kitchen, horror movie totally gone, protesting dad cooking up the pig flesh, watching a politically-charged news show wherein they wanted to smear their philosophical enemies by showing Indiana Jones in reverse, so that Indy was chasing the boulder instead of the boulder chasing Indy even though that’s not how the film was shot and MAN THIS WAS A WEIRD ONE. 

It was around that point that I blessedly woke up.  Well, in a manner of speaking.  More like I stirred myself into a middling-space between being awake and asleep, while nailed down by the pinning sense of anxiety that had haunted me throughout the experience.  Finally my bladder conquered my dozing and I woke fully – at 5:41 AM.  In a defiant stroke against the night’s freakout, I got dressed, went downstairs, and got an early morning snack.  I kept myself moving to clear my head.  Victory.

And then I went back to bed for a quick nap before work.  Brilliant idea.  I emerged once again into the land of undefinable shadows and dread.

Only this time … I was back in school.

I didn’t wake up screaming.  I’m too strong for that.

Cat Sweater

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I am a housecat.

My duty in life is to shed hair, bathe myself with my tongue, and irritate the allergies of the innocent.

Today, my owner forced me into a sweater.  A “cat” sweater.

I have no idea why.  I’m covered with fur. I assume it is because an exclusively-indoor, fur-bearing creature being stuffed into cold-weather clothing is meant to reflect the tenants of that sinister and enigmatic concept humans refer to as “cute”.

(Shudder.)

I dare not explore my owner’s thinking any further for fear it may lead to intractable madness.

I have determined to lay here in protest, on the floor of our central-heating-equipped dwelling, until this woolen body prison is removed and burned. Either that, or until the breaking of spring.  Until then, I try not to consider the disquieting ramifications of my owner’s interest in something called a “feline fashion show”.

Meow.