John Woodington The official site for the author.

SlushPile Hell is FunnyPosted by John Woodington on July 30th, 2010

It’s Friday, so I had to find something to laugh at.  And I did.  I discovered the wonder of SlushPile Hell, which is a blog with the funniest, grossest, worstest things found in the query letter slush pile of this particular literary agent.

Funnier still, they held a contest for people to send in fake/humorous title to THE WORST CHILDREN’S BOOK…EVER.  And for your Friday enjoyment, I have re-posted the list below:

Our WINNER was:  @MJsRetweet:  Daddy Has an Itch. Mommy Smells Like Fish: A Child’s Rhyming Guide to STD’s  Congrats to @MJsRetweet!

And here are the rest of the Top 25 WORST CHILDREN’S BOOKS…EVER, in no particular order:

@SmolderingInk:  The Best Things to Drink Are under the Sink

@LynetteCurtis: Toy Story 3: Buzz Gets a Woody

@harleymaywrites:  Is Angelina My Mommy?

@C_Spaghetti:  Where the Wild Thongs Are

@Janet_Reid:  The Smith & Wesson Coloring Book for Kids

@AVgrl:  Ashley Has Two Daddies, and They’re Both Going to Burn in Hell

@KateHaggard:  Dismemberment Donny Needs A Hand

@SarahEGlenn:  The Secret Pot Garden

@Smolderingink: Princess Poledancer And The Twirly Tassle Gang

@Prettyandi:  Santa Clause, The Tooth Fairy & The Easter Bunny: Just The Beginning of a Lifetime of Lies

@Shelltex:  Math Will Make You Ugly

@Juniperjenny:  The Magical World beneath the Tarp on the Pool

@Thericeman: All Alone with the Internet: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story

@MJsRetweet: The Fog in the Looking Glass (and Other Ways to Find Out if Grandma’s Still with Us)

@alc417: A Buzzing in the Night: Why Your Wii Control’s Batteries Are Gone

@FrozenGlitter: It’s Not that Grandpa Doesn’t Love You, He Just Loves Drinking More

@jjdebenedictis: You Don’t Need to Think When You’re Pretty

@KarlShoemaker:  Furious George Gets Cut Off on the Freeway

@Tobywneal:  Why Do Grandma’s Boobies Touch Her Waist? (And Other Questions Not to Ask Out Loud)

@SarahEGlenn: You’re Not There, God. It’s Me, Christopher Hitchens

@GeneDoucette:  Rachel Has Seven Mommies: A Children’s Guide to the Book of Mormon

@Saraheolson: Things We Can’t Afford because Your Father Left Us

@EliasSerulle:  One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Mercury Poisoning

@LynneKelly:  Frog And Toad Are Friends with Benefits

How hard am I laughing?  So hard that I think I pinched my kidney.  Good weekend.

The King of KongPosted by John Woodington on July 27th, 2010

Just a quick post to say I took some time out of writing (writer slang for slacked off/avoided/procrastinated) to watch an awesome documentary called The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.  I had been told to watch this movie by a friend, and dangit if he wasn’t right.

The King of Kong details the life of Steve Wiebe, a guy who gets laid off from work and decides to fill his time by attempting to break the world record score at Donkey Kong, a classic arcade game.  The documentary pits him against an awesome antagonist in Billy Mitchell, one of the most self-centered, egotistical men I’ve ever seen living.  Wiebe comes off as a genuinely nice guy who loves his family and eagerly anticipates healthy competition.  Billy Mitchell comes off looking like an eviler version of Darth Vader.  Way eviler. 

I couldn’t stop watching.  Check that.  I had to stop watching every 9+ minutes in order to click to the next installment of it on YouTube.  Annoying, but better than paying $30 some dollars on Amazon for the DVD.  Maybe for Christmas…

That’s my plug to all of you people who need to give me a Christmas gift in 5 months.  Never to early to start looking.

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 – One Scene to Improve Your NovelPosted by John Woodington on July 19th, 2010

Sunday morning was one of those times when things just come together.  Remember how I had come up with a foolproof formula for generating light bulb ideas?  Well, apparently the cosmos aligned again Sunday morning, as I was able to crank out the turning point in my novel, a brief scene that will lead me down a larger toward a much better story.  The elements needed for this opportune moment are as follows:

• One bowl of generic honey nut cheerios
• One and a half cups of Dunkin’ Donuts’ original flavor coffee (with sugar and cream)
• One banana
• A good amount of natural light from the west-facing windows
• Laptop
• Story open on laptop
• Remembering the review a writer friend gave on how to make the story better

Combine these elements and Bam!(copyright, Emeril) you’ve got  the perfect setup to write a one-and-a-half-page scene that changes the shape of your novel into something better than it was.

Note: The banana can be substituted for an apple, but not an orange, or anything that requires the removal of a peel to access the fruit itself.  That takes up too much time and kills the formula.  Truth.

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.

Why Self-publishing is BadPosted by John Woodington on July 7th, 2010

One other interesting tidbit I forgot to mention from the Seton Hill writers conference: on the way down to the conference, a fellow writer said to me, “John, I know your thoughts on self-publishing, but you should keep them to yourself while you’re here, because some people here do self-publish, and they might be offended if you said it was bad.”

I do think self-publishing is bad (or, more accurately, I do not think it provides any benefit to the author) and I’m glad that I’m not alone in my thinking.  During a seminar led by Annette Rogers, the acquisitions editor at Poisoned Pen Press, Annette was asked by a writer in the audience what she thought about self-publishing, and if a writer should mention self-published books in their query to her.  She said (not verbatim here), “If you have self-published a book or books in the past, don’t tell me about them, don’t tell anyone about them.  Ever.  Hide them in your garage or burn them in your backyard and pretend they never existed, because legitimate publishers are very wary of working with authors who have self-published content already on the market.  They are not considered publishing credits by anyone.”

She (and the two other agents present) went on to say that the only reason a person would self-publish a book was because it was not good enough for a publishing house to accept.  This made some in the crowd a touch edgy, but I was glad to hear it straight from these guest speakers.  No need to raise hopes when there’s no hope to be had when it comes to self-publishing.

My guess is that some extra drinkin’ went on that night for a few people.

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.