John Woodington The official site for the author.

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’.)

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.

The Story of “Jasper Tilson”Posted by John Woodington on February 16th, 2010

When I was 21 years old, I came up with an idea for a short story about a young man who’s wife suddenly dies, and who then finds out that he does not have the ability to deal with it properly.  I think it partially came from a fear that I had myself.  I was going to be married a year or so later, and was terrified that something would happen to my then fiance/now wife.  I let the story float around in my head until the spring of 2006, almost a year later.  I was in a writing workshop at college, and I decided that it was the right time to write this story.

The initial problem I had was that I’d lost a page of notes that I’d written about the story, and after searching for days, I finally gave them up as lost, and pressed on with the story as I saw it in my head.  I wrote the first draft of the story, then rewrote, redrafted, reread, rewrote, until, five drafts later, I had something with which I was very proud.  I sent it off to the workshop class for critique.

The reviews from my peers were very positive, and my professor at the time said it was one of the better undergraduate short stories she’d seen.  So I figured that meant it was good enough for a strong publication, and I began sending it out to some of the top short story venues.

Two years later I had amassed a pile of rejections, and had lost hope of this story ever seeing the light of publication.  I decided it needed a reread.  I read through it, and to my surprise, saw that it had one major flaw.  It wasn’t finished.  I mean, I had thought it was finished two years earlier, and the praise of my peers hadn’t helped much in that respect.  But when I read it in 2008, I realized it didn’t have a true ending.  So I wrote one.  And I thought the story was much better for it.

I also messed with the title.  I changed it from its original title, “Jasper Tilson”, to “Intervention”, to “A Friendly Intervention”, and then back to “Jasper Tilson”.  The title changing took place over the course of two years itself.  But finally I had it back to “Jasper Tilson”, which was the right title for the story.  Surely publication would come soon.

Cut to the present day, four years after I’d first begun sending it out to publishers, and forty-six rejections later.  That’s right.  Forty-six (46) rejections.  Valentine’s Day, 2010, I get an email from Slow Trains which reads as follows:

Hi John,

Thank you for your submission to Slow Trains. We would like to publish your story in our spring issue, which will be online in late March.

Please return the information sheet below at your earliest convenience, and then we will send you the galleys link for your approval shortly before the issue is linked.

Thank you for contributing to Slow Trains!

Susannah

So now, after four years, forty-six rejections, multiple titles, multiple drafts, multiple endings, and ceasless submissions, “Jasper Tilson” will be published for all the world to read.  I can’t wait to see it at Slow Trains.  And of course, I’ll link to it here when it is up, which should be next month.