John Woodington The official site for the author.

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.

Bob Vila War CryPosted by John Woodington on June 15th, 2010

It’s 5:56 am and I’m awake.  So I’ll let you know what I’m working on currently.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been polishing up a few short stories to get them submission-ready.  I am planning to put another large chunk of time into editing my novel Alien Nation, and whenever I do that, I like to have a couple of stories that I can submit for publication in the background.  It gives me the feeling that, even though I’m holed up for months on a single project, I still have my short stories out there doing work for me.  The stories I’m working on currently are:

• “Memorial” – The one I’ve revised a bunch of times that I resubmitted after the last revision.
• “Reunion” – A story I’ve just finished about a married guy who reunites with his only other long-term relationship, which leads him down a path of personal corruption and self-examination.
• “Love Story from Scatterbrain’s Journal” – A flash fiction piece about a guy who can’t keep his thoughts in order, but who is positive that he is in love with a woman from his work.

I’ve got a couple other stories that need a lot more work on them, so I may just stick with these 3 for now, and see if they can get me a publication or two while I work on the novel.

In more physically fulfilling news, I think I may be a master plumber.  This past weekend I changed out my bathtub drain, which broke apart inside the piping that connects to the tub.  It took about a total of four hours of twisting, chipping, prying, cutting (with a hacksaw and a dremmel tool) and finally I got that beast out of there and put in a fancy shmancy new one.  When I finally finished, I stood up in my bathroom and raised my fists in the air and shouted “I am Bob Vila!”  Then I had a beer.

Side note because it just came to me: Speaking of drains, I wrote a novel about a girl who I called a “Drain”.  Whenever she touched someone, she drained the life out of them.  It was pretty good, though nothing worth showing the world.  In the filing cabinet it shall stay.

Review of The RoadPosted by John Woodington on June 9th, 2010

So far I haven’t heard anything else from the other two literary journals about submitting an updated version of my short story “Memorial,” but these things take time, especially in the summer, when most universities and their lit journals are off doing crazy summer vacation things.  Like teaching summer classes and preparing for fall classes and taking classes to learn how to teach classes better.

In the meantime, I’d like to mention that I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I still can’t get over how good this book is.  The writing is on a level that I didn’t know existed.  McCarthy breaks every rule of writing and does it so well that to read by-the-book writing afterward feels dull and uninspired.  Finding a book that reads quickly but contains great depth is really difficult, but McCarthy does it with ease here.  Or at least it reads like it was easy for him.  I’m actually hoping it was wicked difficult and took him endless months to get the narrative to read as well as it does, otherwise I’m going to lose a little hope in myself.  I read a book by Hemmingway about writing where he talked about trying to beat other writers of his day in order to become the best writer in America.  I really don’t think you beat The Road.  “Beatable” is not an adjective I’d use around this book.

I’m currently working on finishing up two short stories, and then getting back into revising and polishing my novel Alien Nation.  I head off to a writers retreat in Pennsylvania at the end of the month, and I’d like to have a few things to show the editors there.  Pretty sure they won’t thing Alien Nation is the next The Road, but here’s hoping.

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.