j. h. woodyatt

About Me

I tend instinctively to guard my personal information, so let me just throw down a quotation here and let readers puzzle over it.

"[...] Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision.

By now I am pretty sure that looking for such a presence and such a vision is a bad idea. The main trouble is that you might succeed and your success might let you imagine that you have something more to rely on than the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings. [...]"

—Richard Rorty, _Trotsky and the Wild Orchids_ (1992)

Why do you write?

At the moment, I'm mulling what to do with a first draft of a 8000 word short story. I've had more than one person tell me it's the prologue that I should make sure to cut from the next novel I write. Grmf. I am not in a big hurry to write more novels after the first one didn't sell.

My current plan is to distract myself from these personal failures by writing more stories and posting the occasional flash here.

Any favorite authors? Books?

I read a lot of non-fiction, and some commercial genre fiction, specifically fantasy and SF. I'm interested in writing commercial fantasy and/or science fiction, but it would appear that I'm not good enough at it yet.