John Woodington The official site for the author.

Lots of (Parentheticals)Posted by John Woodington on September 2nd, 2010

I’m making good headway on my final draft (hopefully) of my novel Alien Nation.  I had hoped to get it done before my MFA class started on the 8th of September (6 days), though I can’t in good conscience say that is going to happen (suck).  I’ve got a lot more to go (about 200 pages) and I’m finding I can polish about 5-10 pages an hour, which adds up to 20-40 hours of work left before I call this thing readable (which is a lot of time).  Getting 40 hours of book time out of 6 days is not going to happen, I guarantee.  I mean, I’ve got a life, and dogs, and a wife, and friends (through my wife, mostly) and if I don’t pay them any attention, they may hate me, and that would be no funzies.

Also, I am eagerly anticipating the approach of autumn.  Summer was wicked hot here, and I’m ready for some crisp air, crisp leaves, and crisp cider.  I’m slowly shifting my wardrobe to plaids and half-zip sweaters.  I’m wearing shoes instead of sandals.  I’m drinking chai tea.  I’m plotting which apple orchards to visit.  Scarves are becoming more appealing.  It’s a disease, really.

Speaking of scarves, if you’re looking for a handmade scarf (or hat, or vintage necktie!) as a gift, or just to wear, check out my wife’s etsy website, where she sells a bunch of awesome scarves she has hand-knitted.  They are quite lovely.

New Point of View – First Person VicariousPosted by John Woodington on July 23rd, 2010

So I’m sitting here thinking, “what can I do to bring out this particular narrative idea in my novel,” when all of a sudden, I get a light bulb idea, which leads me to rewrite the ending of my story.  I decided to break a cardinal rule of writing, the one that says you should never shift the point of view of your story.  Well I tried it.  And so far, I kinda like it.  The shift only occurs for about ten pages, but it’s something weird and different and I like the heck out of it.  The first person narrator/main character vicariously experiences something that another character is experiencing, and the narrative captures that.  It’s basically a first person narrator briefly hedging his way into some sort of third person omniscience, without ever leaving his own head, of course.  I can break rules, but I can’t destroy them.

I’m hoping this particular risk pays off.  Right now, I’m feeling like I need to do something coolish and new to get this story recognized, and I figure I may as well throw caution to the ether until somebody tells me it sucks.  Or until a consensus of people who have good, objective judgment tells me it sucks.  Breaking the rules of good-sense English is not usually my bag, so this is out there for me, and I kinda dig it.

It reminds me of a birthday card I saw earlier this year which went something like this:

[picture of two guys]
“Where’s the party at?”
“Dude, that’s incorrect grammar.  You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.”
[open the card]
Where’s the party at, b*tch?”

Now that’s just good English right there.  Can’t fault ‘em for fixing their own lexical aberration, right?

Happy Friday.

Writing Formula – Light Bulb IdeasPosted by John Woodington on July 14th, 2010

Monday night, at about 11:15 pm, while waiting for my wife to get home from Eclipse, I had a few light bulb ideas that should fix the biggest remaining problems with my novel, Alien Nation.  The following is the fool-proof formula for generating light bulb ideas:

• Two glasses of Phillips Union Original Flavor whiskey
• One Jack’s pepperoni pizza
• One hour of watching John Mayer videos on YouTube where he does funny stuff
• Twenty minutes staring at novel and doing nothing with it
• One more glass of Phillips Union Original Flavor whiskey
• Forty seconds thinking about how delicious Phillips Union Original Flavor whiskey is
• Ten more minutes staring at novel while resting head on table because it got kinda heavy
• Light bulb idea

Now that I’ve got these light bulb ideas, all I have to do is update the manuscript with them and bing bang boom, we got ourselves a done book.

Should only take a month or two.

Novel RevisionsPosted by John Woodington on July 10th, 2010

I received a really helpful review of my novel Alien Nationfrom fellow writer Deanna Lepsch this past week.  She gave me some great insights for revisions that will make the novel stronger as a whole, and for that I am very grateful.  The best critiques are the one that give you something off of which to work.  It doesn’t help much when someone says, “You know, I don’t really like your overall style and tone.  Can you change that on all 400 pages?  That’d be great.”

She gave me tips like, “John, you use the words ‘that’ and ‘just’ too much.  ‘Just’ cut ‘that’ crap out.”

and, “John, you need a new beginning and a new ending.”

Okay, that one was more in-depth in person, but you get the idea.  I’m just glad she only thought the beginning and end need to be fixed.  Fixing the middle of a novel sucks a big one, trust me.

All Work and No Play Makes John a BloggerPosted by John Woodington on July 4th, 2010

The days are currently spent writing feverishly, editing feverishly, deleting feverishly, and hoping that I don’t come down with some legitimate illness with feverish symptoms to prevent me from completing all this work bysome sort of respectable deadline.  I’ve still got some sucky work left on Alien Nation before it’s ready to go, but I’ve been finding the time to do it, and it’s getting done.

I must thank my wife who is not only helping me find the time to write, but who is also berating me when I am not writing (hopefully she will not catch me blogging here when I am supposed to be writing).  I think her goal is to get me to finish this so that it call sell and she can take her self-appointed manager’s cut of the proceeds, which I have ben informed are a scant 75% of all earnings.  How she finagled me to sign that dotted line is beyond me.  Then again, one sad face from her and I’d sign away a limb.

I just finished reading The Hoursby Michael Cunningham, and am hoping that the discussion on Goodreads enlightens me to some of the deeper workings of the novel.  It was beautifully written, a true homage to Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf’s work in general, but it was also complex, and I think a discussion between readers will unwind some of that complexity for me.

My gut tells me this is a great novel, mostly because I’m still thinking about it.  Not like when I finished reading Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series and realized I couldn’t remember entire novels of content (What the hell happened in Blood of the Fold or Temple of the Winds?  Bags if I know).  So kudos to Cunningham for writing a book that lodges itself in the mind of the reader and forces them to examine it deeper for a truly satisfying experience.  That’s really what all us writers should be trying to do.

Review of The RoadPosted by John Woodington on June 9th, 2010

So far I haven’t heard anything else from the other two literary journals about submitting an updated version of my short story “Memorial,” but these things take time, especially in the summer, when most universities and their lit journals are off doing crazy summer vacation things.  Like teaching summer classes and preparing for fall classes and taking classes to learn how to teach classes better.

In the meantime, I’d like to mention that I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I still can’t get over how good this book is.  The writing is on a level that I didn’t know existed.  McCarthy breaks every rule of writing and does it so well that to read by-the-book writing afterward feels dull and uninspired.  Finding a book that reads quickly but contains great depth is really difficult, but McCarthy does it with ease here.  Or at least it reads like it was easy for him.  I’m actually hoping it was wicked difficult and took him endless months to get the narrative to read as well as it does, otherwise I’m going to lose a little hope in myself.  I read a book by Hemmingway about writing where he talked about trying to beat other writers of his day in order to become the best writer in America.  I really don’t think you beat The Road.  “Beatable” is not an adjective I’d use around this book.

I’m currently working on finishing up two short stories, and then getting back into revising and polishing my novel Alien Nation.  I head off to a writers retreat in Pennsylvania at the end of the month, and I’d like to have a few things to show the editors there.  Pretty sure they won’t thing Alien Nation is the next The Road, but here’s hoping.

Where Ya Been?Posted by John Woodington on May 3rd, 2010

It’s time to move on.  Jasper Tilson has been published and the influx of blog readers has subsided, and now it’s back to business.  Already.  Kinda sad, really.  I worked on getting Jasper published for four years, and in two weeks, he’s out in the public sphere and lost to the interwebs.  Maybe he’ll reappear someday in a short story collection.  I’m not currently the kind of writer who moves their characters from one story to another, reusing them like fishing lures.  I get their stories down on paper and move on.  So now we move on.

I’ve finished reading through my current draft of AlieNation, my novel-in-progress about divorce, working in an office, and alien abductions.  I’m pretty pleased with it so far, mostly because I know it has the potential to be the best thing I’ve written in a long while if I stick with it and take the time necessary to flesh it out to its full potential.  Just used the word ‘potential’ twice in the same sentence, and I apologize for that right there.  The next steps I will take with this novel are to go through the many notes I’ve made while doing the read-through and rewrite, and to implement those notes into the story.  Some will take twenty seconds, and some will take twenty days, maybe more.  Once those are in, I’ll go through each chapter and optimize the wording, cutting and trimming and rewriting until the language is sharp and crisp and definite and ambiguous.  Sounds confusing, I know, just trust me.  After that, I’ll consider it pretty much done, and I’ll begin giving it to a couple of my trusted readers for their initial critiques.  After critiques I’ll do another rewrite, then start looking for a new literary agent.

And then I’ll be sixty-two years old.  Just kidding.  I’d like to get drafts out for reading by the end of the summer.  That’s the goal.  I’d also like to polish up a couple of short stories in that time, as well as edit out a short story from a couple sections of AlieNation that I believe would make for a very good short story.  Plus, if I can get a part of the novel published as a short story, that’ll possibly help me get the whole novel itself published.  At least, that’s how I imagine it.

So how will I do all of this in a scant four months?  Well, my wife and I are making a very personal, very deep commitment, and that commitment is to get rid of the TV in our living room.  I sit in front of that friggin’ box for 2-3 hours a night, and I’m sick of it.  We waste our lives watching waste on TV, and it’s time to eradicate the source of our brain-dead distraction.  We will still have a small TV in the bedroom for news in the morning, and a TV in the guest room, where we will watch a select few shows (Mad Men, mostly) and movies.  Other than that, for us it’s radio and books and writing and playing with our wieners.

Wiener dogs, that is.

So far, I haven’t felt any symptoms of withdrawal.  I figured the first omission of a rerun of The Officewould leave me writhing on the floor shivering and shrieking for Steve Carell.  Not so.  Not yet.  I will be strong in this endeavor, and I truly believe it can only lead to good things.  Or ultimate nervous breakdown.  On the immediate bright side of things, removing the hulking TV from the family room frees up a bunch more space for bookshelves, and, consequently, more books.  Right now I’m reading the ever-great Missouri Review, and then it’ll be on to Fight Club, about which I’ve heard mixed opinions.

Finally, thanks to everyone who donated to my wife’s and my team for the Animal Humane Society 2010 Walk for Animals.  We exceeded our personal goal ($1000), and saved the lives of many cute puppies, despite what the protesters at the beginning of the walk had to say (They made a big stink about a 45% kill rate, and I said, maybe if they donated more to my wife’s and my walking team, the AHS could afford to keep some of those animals alive for longer in order to find them loving homes.  Just sayin’.)

Yucky Draft Number 3Posted by John Woodington on April 11th, 2010

I come to this stage every time I edit a novel.  It’s the stage where motivation lags, where other opportunities for satisfaction present themselves, and where, inevitably, my ability to cruise through drafts falters.  I’m 265 pages into my edit of AlieNation, with 160 pages to go.  Outside it is warm and my scooter and fishing rods are calling me.  The Masters is on TV.  My dogs ask me daily to take them for a long walk, and I’m always tempted to oblige them (especially when they give me their best begging face).  I’m getting the itch to drop an old, nostalgic video game into my Playstation.  Sitting inside in solitude and pecking and trimming and cutting a manuscript in solitude does not seem so appealing right now.

It comes and goes, however,  in waves.  Last night, while avoiding writing, I caught the 2009 Minnesota Book Awards on TV.  And then I had the desire to write.  But it was 9:59 pm, and I’d told myself I’d be in bed by ten, so I didn’t flip open the computer.  I’m searching for motivators here.  Maybe I’ll be more inclined to push forward on this novel when I see my short story “Jasper Tilson” out at Slow Trains, though there seems to be some delay in that.  Maybe I’ll be more inclined to write after I eat some breakfast.  Maybe motivation will bloom if I get an out-of-the-blue email from a great literary agent asking to represent me.  I can dream.

In reality, I’ll sit and stare at the open tab on my computer for about ten more minutes, then start to look at it, then find something to change, then something else, then something else, and before you know it, it’ll be June, and I’ll be on my fourth draft of this thing, glad that I pushed through yucky draft number 3.

The Novel Editing Process, and the NCAA Tournament. And Lolita.Posted by John Woodington on March 26th, 2010

I edited through a couple chapters of AlieNation on my lunch break yesterday, and found some good stuff and some bad stuff, which seems to be the way of things with this novel, and with writing in general.  I’ve been trying to think ahead, to plan the steps I need to take to get this novel from its current state to a finished, submittable format.  Right now, I’m going through, just trying to cut out the fluff in as large of sections as I can, and so far I’ve cut about 30 pages, which is great.  I’ve purposely been skipping some of the more minuscule revisions in this draft, and I’ve also been putting off doing some of the more reworking-minded things.

As I go through the manuscript, I take notes about the things that strike me as strange, or in need of rework, or in need of bolstering (thematically, usually).  After I get through this Cut-Out-The-Crap revision, I’m thinking I’ll do an Add-In-And-Bolster-The-Theme revision, followed by a Home-And-Refine-The-Language revision.  After that, I should be about done.  Then comes the daunting task of finding a new agent.

*ominous music swells in the background*

I just finished reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and I’ll say that it was very well-written, especially for someone who’s native language is Russian, but who did, in fact, write the novel in English.  The story itself was quite unsettling, and while I hear there are a couple similarly unsettling Hollywood treatments of this text, I think I’ll avoid them.  What I’ve seen in my mind’s eyes does not need to be seen by my actual eyes.  Come on, Humbert.  Get your act together.

In the meantime, I’m enchanted by the NCAA basketball tournament, and by how quickly my prediction bracket has become a useless mess of scribbles and crossed-out colleges.

Hilary Duff’s Literary Master(fall to)piecesPosted by John Woodington on March 22nd, 2010

Little by little, I get further and further in my editing of my novel AlieNation, and little by little, I find that I’m liking what I’m seeing.  Apparently the first draft was written when my writing skills were feeling juiced up, because things are connecting, and that makes me happy.  Every once in a while I stumble upon a phrase or line of dialogue which I’d forgotten I’d wrote, and it makes me laugh.

In related news, I posted a short little poem to Fictionaut today, and I’m hoping for some good reviews.

In not-related news, I read about this book deal in my Publishers Lunch today:

Hilary Duff’s multiple-book YA series, starting with ELIXIR, combining the allure of a dangerous love triangle with thrilling international adventure as a young photojournalist travels the globe in a race to unravel a centuries-old mystery that could unlock the key to her soulmate’s true identity and the secret of her father’s disappearance.

So now you have something to put on your Christmas list for this year, under the category of “Works of High Literature I’d Like to Own.”