John Woodington The official site for the author.

Who I Write Like, ApparentlyPosted by John Woodington on September 3rd, 2010

Found this awesome thingy on the web: a generator that tells you which famous author you write like.  You paste some of your writing into the text field and it spits out a name.  Couldn’t tell you if it is in any way accurate or not (probably not) but it is fun.  After a few attempts with different pieces of my writing, I apparently write like the following writers:

• Margaret Atwood
• Cory Doctorow
• Chuck Palahniuk
• James Joyce

So there’s an odd combination of writers.  Palahniuk really throws a wrench into the mix, since I would say he and Joyce are about as far apart in style as writers can be.

Still, a ton of fun, and worth wasting your Friday trying.

Gonna Git Edumacated – Hamline MFAPosted by John Woodington on August 23rd, 2010

I’ve decided (with the help of my manager/wife) to go back to school to get my MFA in Creative Writing.  I’ve been toying with this idea since the day I graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire, but have never taken the initiative to figure out how to do it without quitting my job/losing my house.

This past February, my wife and I were out to dinner (at Cowboy Jacks, which has bomb sweet potato fries) and she said to me (roughly), “John, I know you want to do this [get an MFA], and you will regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t.  So you should do it now before we start having children.”

And I said, “You are a genius.  I owe you many diamonds and puppies for this.”

Which left me in need of a school that fit my schedule, which basically eliminated 99.2% of all schools on earth.  Fortunately, I found Hamline University in St. Paul, which has an MFA program designed for working adults.  All of the classes are in the evenings or on Saturday mornings.  I talked to a coworker who just finished his MFA there, and he said he really enjoyed it.

So, I put together a submission package, contacted a couple of my dearest professors from back in my UWEC days, and applied to the MFA program at Hamline.  I haven’t received word yet if I’ve been accepted or not, but I’m very hopeful (and a little over-confident) that I’ll get in.  I say over-confident because I’ve enrolled in a class and start on September 8th, and I would not have dropped the money on it if I didn’t think I would get in.

I am really looking forward to pursuing this degree, and all the challenges it will present.  I told my wife early on that I would not be quitting my day job to go to school, and I will not be quitting my day job after I receive my degree in order to go off and teach at a college somewhere.  I enjoy my day job.  It involves working with great people and getting paid far more than a college professor.  Just sayin’.

While I’m guessing this new workload will impair my ability to finish my novel Alien Nation (in final draft mode finally!) I still plan to finish that beast before the year is up.  Which is good, because I’ll be expected to write another novel as my thesis for the MFA, though that won’t be for another 3 years.  That means I’ll have about 7 years of college behind me at that point.

As “Tommy Boy” Tom Callahan said, “Hey.  A lot of guys go to college for 7 years.”

“Yeah.  They’re called writers.”

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.

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.

Synopses SuckPosted by John Woodington on July 1st, 2010

Still buzzing from the Seton Hill writers conference.  Still reveling in the glory that is the Query Shark blog, and all the invaluable aid it gives to writers struggling with their query letters.  It also highlights the lack of any similar resource for novel synopses, which is something that was requested from me by one of the agents, and the minute I heard the request, my happiness at being asked for content at all abated.

A synopsis is a 2-10 page description of what happens from the beginning to the end of your novel, and writing this beast sucks.  How to distill 114,000 words down to 700 words is beyond me, but I’ve got to do it, and I’ve got to do it fast so I can get the thing sent out while it is still fresh in the mind of the agent who requested it.  My approach is to write one or two sentences about each chapter as I polish through them, and then edit that bulk of content down into something readable, believable, lovable.  You get the idea.

I found a couple of helpful references for writing synopses (nothing like the Query Shark, though), and though I could list them here, I won’t, since you can just go Google “novel synopsis help” all by yo’self.

Speaking of aquatic animals (Query Shark is close enough)  check out this new whale named after Herman Melville.  Moby-Dick is one of my favorite books of all time, so this make me pretty happy-ish.

The Return from Seton HillPosted by John Woodington on June 28th, 2010

I’ve returned from the Seton Hill writer’s conference, and must say that I’ve had a wonderful time.  Seton Hill is beautiful, the people were wonderful, and the experiences were invaluable.  Basically what happens is you go to this place that looks like Hogwarts castle, write for hours, nerd out with other writers from all across North America, pitch to some really great agents, and then party the night away with everyone and their brother.

Highlights:

1. Receiving humorous daily death threats from Donna Munro, who is one crazy writer and a super nice person.

2. Me telling Jim McCarthy that I toyed with the idea of scaring him by trying to pitch a short story collection to him.

3. Writer Melanie Card telling Jim McCarthy that his pitch schedule included a 30-minute “potty break”, and then never letting her hear the end of it.

4. Me reading my query letter to Janet Reid (aka the Query Shark) and her responding with, “For the Win!”

5. All of the guest speakers telling all of the writers never to self-publish anything ever ever ever, and if you did, never tell anyone, not even your conscious self.

6. Filling this guy (who I call “Therapist”) with too much Scotch and then watching him try judo moves on people:

Which was pretty much awesome.  As you might’ve guessed.

Now all I’ve got to do is send off query letters and some pages to a few people, and then start saving money to go back next year.

Close Encounters in PennsylvaniaPosted by John Woodington on June 21st, 2010

I’m gearing up for my first writing retreat.  Exciting.  The one I’m going to is at Seton Hill University, and it is a retreat for writers of popular fiction.  I would say that I sometimes write popular fiction, though I tend to have more of a literary slant in my work.  The reason this sort of retreat appeals to me is that I would like some of the financial success of a popular fiction writer, without having to write the shallow, plot-heavy stories.  I’m hoping this retreat will help me out a little in that regard.  It’s way out in Pennsylvania, and I’m flying there Thursday.  And I have to get up at 3:30 am to make the flight.  Yuckity yuck yuck.

Also, my former agent works out of Pennsylvania, so maybe I will have a close encounter of the formerly-my-agent kind.  That would be cool.  I never met her in person, and she seemed very nice, though I don’t think were a good match as far as what I was writing and what she was selling.  There will be agents at the retreat, and I’m hoping to work on my pitch to them while I’m there.  My novel Alien Nation would be the most likely candidate with which to practice, so I’ll bring the first chunk of that along with me.

Bob Vila War CryPosted by John Woodington on June 15th, 2010

It’s 5:56 am and I’m awake.  So I’ll let you know what I’m working on currently.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been polishing up a few short stories to get them submission-ready.  I am planning to put another large chunk of time into editing my novel Alien Nation, and whenever I do that, I like to have a couple of stories that I can submit for publication in the background.  It gives me the feeling that, even though I’m holed up for months on a single project, I still have my short stories out there doing work for me.  The stories I’m working on currently are:

• “Memorial” – The one I’ve revised a bunch of times that I resubmitted after the last revision.
• “Reunion” – A story I’ve just finished about a married guy who reunites with his only other long-term relationship, which leads him down a path of personal corruption and self-examination.
• “Love Story from Scatterbrain’s Journal” – A flash fiction piece about a guy who can’t keep his thoughts in order, but who is positive that he is in love with a woman from his work.

I’ve got a couple other stories that need a lot more work on them, so I may just stick with these 3 for now, and see if they can get me a publication or two while I work on the novel.

In more physically fulfilling news, I think I may be a master plumber.  This past weekend I changed out my bathtub drain, which broke apart inside the piping that connects to the tub.  It took about a total of four hours of twisting, chipping, prying, cutting (with a hacksaw and a dremmel tool) and finally I got that beast out of there and put in a fancy shmancy new one.  When I finally finished, I stood up in my bathroom and raised my fists in the air and shouted “I am Bob Vila!”  Then I had a beer.

Side note because it just came to me: Speaking of drains, I wrote a novel about a girl who I called a “Drain”.  Whenever she touched someone, she drained the life out of them.  It was pretty good, though nothing worth showing the world.  In the filing cabinet it shall stay.

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.

Updating Submissions in ProgressPosted by John Woodington on May 28th, 2010

So we’ll try a little experiment here.  In my last post I mentioned that I had updated my short story “Memorial” into a much better story, and was subsequently bummed out that I had already submitted the non-updated version to many of my top tier locations.  13 of 17 of those submissions have been rejected, but 4 are still out there in review.  So I thought I might query those four places and see if they would let me send them the updated version of the story, since they had not yet reviewed the initial non-updated version I had sent them in March.  Those venues are:

• American Literary Review
• American Short Fiction
• Black Warrior Review
• The Carolina Quarterly

I emailed these four fine literary magazines asking if I could send them the new version of the story.  I’ve never tried this before, so I really don’t know what to expect.  They could all shoot me down, or they could say, “ah, what the heck, send us the new draft.”  I’m hoping for the latter, obviously.

edit 6-1-2010: Black Warrior Review allowed me to submit the updated version of the story, and so now I like them more.  Updated story sent.

edit 6-3-2010: American Literary Review said I could resubmit, but I’d have to wait until October to do so, since their reading period is currently closed, and anything I sent to them now, even a submission update, would automatically be sent back by their interns.  That’s cool.  I had them withdraw the original submission I’d sent them and will send them the updated one in October, as long as it has not already published by then.