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’.)