John Woodington The official site for the author.

Jasper Tilson is Riding the Slow TrainsPosted by John Woodington on April 18th, 2010

My short story “Jasper Tilson” is now published at Slow Trains.  You can read it by clicking the following link:

Jasper Tilson at Slow Trains

I’m really excited to finally see this story in print.  I have to thank Slow Trains for publishing it.  I have to thank Deanna Lepsch and my wife for reviewing it not too long ago, and giving it the last few nudges to get it publication ready.  Finally, I must thank Allyson Loomis and everybody else in my 2006 Creative Writing Seminar at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire for reading and critiquing the initial draft.  This story would be sitting in a computer folder right now if not for the help of all of these people.

Thank you.

Jasper’s Galleys Are Proof(ed)Posted by John Woodington on April 13th, 2010

Just a quick post to let y’all know that I received the galleys from Slow Trains for my short story “Jasper Tilson,” which will be online in a week or so, and it looks very nice.  For those of you who can’t imagine what galleys would look like for a story that will appear on the Internet, basically it is just the formatted web page that the story will appear on when it is released.  Slow Trains sends me a hyperlink to the as-yet-unpublished page, and I go read through it, let them know if there are any mistakes or corrections (I didn’t find any) and they they make any suggested changes (if they want to), and then it gets published onto the Internet.  Pretty cool process.  Usually I just get an email (sometimes not) that a story is now online, without giving me any chance to review it.  So thank you Slow Trains for at least making me feel a little like a real author by giving me the chance to proofread my story once more before it goes out to all the people of the world.

I’ll link to the story here when it is published.

By the way: why do they call the proofs of a story “galleys”?  That makes me think of seafaring adventures.  Let me know if you know so we can all know.

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 Best Weight-loss Plan EverPosted by John Woodington on April 7th, 2010

On Monday, I discovered the most effective weight-loss plan in the history of the world.  I call it the “Stomach Flu” plan.  In twenty-four hours I lost about 90 pounds.  At least, it felt like I did.

Glimmer Train has a nice little interview with Thomas E. Kennedy, in which he describes and provides a great little exercise called the “cut-up technique” which gets you to stop thinking logically and start writing better.  Scariest of all is that it makes sense.  And works.  I may have to try it.

The Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize for Fiction is taking submissions until May 18th, and if you win, you get $1,500.00, which is like $8,765.93 in Writer Money and $12,346.17 in College Money.  Of course, there’s a $15.00 reading fee when you submit, but that’s about as low of a fee as you will find for a prize that size.

My short story “Memorial” was rejected by Crazyhorse, though the rejection email disappointed me a bit.

We are sorry this particular manuscript was not selected for publication in Crazyhorse. We hope you will send us another soon, though. We could not publish Crazyhorse without the fine writing submitted to us. While we regret that the large number of submissions we receive makes it difficult for the editors to respond personally, we want to emphasize that an editor personally read your manuscript. Devoted reading is part of the Crazyhorse editorial mission; it is also our own personal one.

I was really hoping for an image of a truly crazy horse to come violently neighing out of my computer screen to slap me in the face with its oat bag and shriek at me that it hated my story and it had bigger fields to gallop through.  Basically Mr. Ed after a trough of Mountain Dew.  Ya feel me?

Great Poems, Tentacles, and Nixon KindlesPosted by John Woodington on April 1st, 2010

The writing’s going just fine.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can get to the good stuff.  April is National Poetry Month here in the US of A, which means we should think about poetry extra hard this month.  I’ve never been a big fan of poetry.  Some of it is great, while some of it is quite cryptic and confusing.  I think a lot of it is composed by people throwing handfuls of word magnets at their refrigerators and then transcribing the results.  Some poems, however, are truly beautiful.  I really enjoy listening to Li-Young Lee reading his poem “Station”.  And I can never get enough of this little gem by Robert Frost called “Forgive, O Lord…”:

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me

Is that appropriate for the season of Lent?  I don’t know.

Speaking of borderline-appropriate, check out the sweet cover for the Spring 2010 issue of American Short Fiction:

I would read this book just because of the cover.  Heck, that’s how I got sucked into the dreadful writing of Terry Goodkind as a teenager.  I mean, look at that tentacle-face-hair-monster-maybe-a-woman thing.  It’s wicked cool.  No doubt about it.  Also, American Short Fiction publishes great writing, so the cover is probably only the beginning of the awesomeness here.

And finally, the apotheossis of this exceptional blog post: A Richard Nixon-esque Kindle t-shirt.

Sorry for blowing your mind just there.  My bad.