John Woodington The official site for the author.

Resubmissions and ParentheticalsPosted by John Woodington on May 27th, 2010

I think I won’t write about not watching TV anymore.  It is boring stuff, and I can only say so many times, “Hey, I’m still not watching TV.”  It’s starting to sound like bragging, which means that’s the end of it.  I’m not watching TV, and I’m not writing about not watching TV.  The first rule of not watching TV is you don’t talk about not watching TV.  Ditto on the second rule.

I think I’ve completed my best short story yet.  It’s called “Memorial.”  I’ve had free time to work on it in the evenings, and I finally got a printer up and running in our house, so I printed it off, edited it through a couple times, made two moderately major changes (set it in the present instead of the future, and removed clipped coloquial verbiage, both upon recommendations of trusted readers) and now I think it’s quite publishable.  The problem?  I’ve already submitted it to 17 places in its “set-in-the-future-with-clipped-coloquial-verbiage” form.  So that sucks, because those 17 place were some of my top-tier places that I submit to, and since 13 of them have already rejected it, I can’t submit it to them again.  So now it’s off to other markets, hopefully ones that pay more than just contributors copies.

I know many authors think that if a story (or poem or essay or poemessay(?)) is rejected, they can significantly revise that story and resubmit it as a new piece of material to the very place that has already rejected them.  I don’t believe in that approach.  I say if you get rejected, you keep a stiff upper lip and move on to the next venue, whether you revise the story or not.  Were I an editor of a literary journal (or publishing house) I wouldn’t want to see the same story three times in three different draft forms.  That’d be a waste of time.  I’d say if an editor asks for a revision specifically, then go for it, but otherwise, don’t resubmit it even after significant editing.

(Also, I love parentheticals (and double-parentheticals) because they are so easy to drop in wherever you’d like.)

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’.)

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.

With More Drafts to ComePosted by John Woodington on March 16th, 2010

I’m 216 pages into the editing of my novel AlieNation, and things are starting to flow now.  I’m finding that there are certain areas which are a bit loose, but I’ll clean those up in the next draft.  Right now, I’m looking for stuff that doesn’t belong, or is just plain wrong.  Get rid of all the crap, then polish up the stuff that still needs to be there in some capacity.  The hardest part so far is when I want to add new content.  I’d like to rewrite and add some stuff to push the novel more closely to its underlying themes, though I have a feeling this will be a separate draft all in itself.  We’ll see.

In publishing news, I should be getting the online proofs of my short story “Jasper Tilson,” which is set to appear in the next issue of Slow Trains, due out later this month.  I eagerly anticipate their arrival, as I’ve never had the pleasure of reviewing proofs for my own story before.  Usually the publishers just mock it up and print it how they want it.  So I consider this a new level in my publishing life.

I shall mini-celebrate with my friend Earl Grey right now.

A 5% Reduction in Manuscript PagesPosted by John Woodington on March 8th, 2010

I’m making progress on my edit of my novel AlieNation.  This thing started out at 463 pages, and is now down to 440, which I calculate to be about a 5% reduction in manuscript pages (like the title of this post says.  See what I did there?  Right?)  I’d say this is pretty good as far as edits go, because I’m not even halfway through the manuscript, so I’m hoping to cut off a good bit more by the end of this particular edit.  I’d like to get down to 400 pages in this draft, but we’ll see.  That’d be almost a 14% reduction in pages, which is more than my original goal of 10%.

Note to self and everyone else: I think I got that 10% goal from Stephen King’s On Writing.  Don’t know why I stick with it.  I don’t really like King’s work (Except for On Writing, which is great), but I respect him for the sole fact that he gets stuff done.  And I want to get this thang done.  I think he gets stuff done well enough to use the phrase “git ‘r done” at his readings and talks, but I’m not sure.

I’m also finding that putting time aside to work on editing is difficult, mostly because I enjoy the writing part of things more than the editing.  That said, nothing I write ever gets published unless I edit the snot out of it, and since I want this story to be successful, I’ll hunker down and put in my time with it to make it the best I can.  I’m just lacking a bit of motivation, naw meen?

And I just saw this: it’s called a Vook, and it is an eBook that you both read and watch, as it contains video.  Is this cool?  Maybe.  Not sure, since I don’t own any of the necessary technology to read/watch any Vooks.  Also, the word “Vook” just sounds too much like a person with a Russian accent trying to curse in English.  What the H is that about?

2010 Pronunciation Support, and EditingPosted by John Woodington on March 2nd, 2010

Just thought I would let you know that my campaign to get people to pronounce this year “twenty-ten” instead of “two thousand ten” has gained steam.  There’s a t-shirt you can buy that may or may not help further this worthy cause.  It can be found over at BustedTees.

I’ve gotten to the point in editing my novel where I find there are certain things I know should be cut, but I feel a pang of fear that I will be cutting something that I will inevitably want to use in a later draft.  My remedy to this conundrum?  Paste every major thing I cut into a document called “Stuff Cut From AlieNation.doc”.  Now tell me that ain’t a great idea raht thar.