Today we’d like to introduce you to Jack Woodville London.
Hi Jack Woodville , thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up in Groom, a very small town in the Texas panhandle, where I was blessed to have an English teacher who encouraged both my writing and my reading. I knew that I wanted to write but also thought that making a living sounded good, and then there was the Vietnam war. I ultimately made it to the University of Texas Law School, where I became managing editor of the Texas International Law Journal. I began to learn about the importance of being precise and clear, two very different things. After I became an attorney, I wrote endless legal briefs and pleadings, and I also learned how to do deep research. Along the way I wrote and published legal articles on such things as the rules of evidence, engineering failures in aviation crashes, jurisdictional disputes. At night I dabbled in trying to write fiction.
My first novel was published in 2009; my most recent in 2025. Along the way I have written six books, including a non-fiction book on how to write books. My next work out will be a non-fiction somewhat academic history work about the 1836 boundaries of Texas.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I have an attic full of rejection letters, some of which I re-read from time to time to remember the taste of crow. My first agent was indicted for collecting and stealing royalties from her clients and my first novel was never accepted for publication. When I finally got a novel published I began like many, taking my books to book shows around Texas and praying for someone to buy one, struggling with book stores to stock my work, that sort of thing. I stayed with it when I was tempted to stop, and along the way I revised my work over and over, challenging myself with the belief that I can make it better. I am blessed with a wonderful and supportive wife and now have a wonderful agent, publicist, editor, and social media coordinator, without whom there would be no road, smooth or otherwise.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
After my children were grown and gone I was accepted to train at the Academy of Fiction in St. Céré, France, where I studied under famed mystery writer Peter May. Shortly afterward I began to write the French Letters series, a trilogy based on a fictional Texas family that is caught up in World War II. My second novel in the series, “Engaged in War,” earned for me the award 2012 Author of the Year by the Military Writers Society of America. When I finally retired from law I enrolled in summer school at Oxford University and studied creative writing under Jonathan Miles. I still attend Oxford every summer.
The final novel in the French Letters series, titled “Children of a Good War,” was named Best War and Military Novel in the United States in 2018 and included in Kirkus Reviews Best Novels of 2018 edition.
My fiction is history – based, that is to say not just set in past times and written in ‘bygonese’, but stories that arise from historical events that took place. For example, my current novel “Dangerous Latitudes,” is set in Texas in 1842-1843. Very few people know much about the ten years in Texas after 1836 or before the Civil War. “Dangerous Latitudes” involves four characters who are caught up in the Mexican invasions of Texas six years after the fall of the Alamo, of Mexico again capturing San Antonio and the Alamo twice in 1842, and the seizure of more than fifty of San Antonio’s leading citizens who were marched to imprisonment more than a thousand miles away in Perote Prison in Vera Cruz. It becomes the story of the frantic efforts of some heroic men and women to rescue almost two hundred men sentenced to be shot in a hacienda deep in San Luis Potosi.
If anything sets me apart it might be the lengths to which I go to research my work, both fiction and speaking. I probably take longer to write my novels than most writers do, but when you read them you will learn the names of almost unknown people who were there, men and women who waded onto the French beaches, shopkeepers in San Antonio who stood up to invading armies and marauding Native Americans, heroic people whose names don’t have the cachet of General Eisenhower or William B. Travis but who are the true heroes of our past.
On a parallel track I occasionally am honored to be a speaker at significant American military events. I was a guest speaker in 2018 on the 100th Anniversary of the Armistice of World War One at the Meuse-Argonne American Military Cemetery in France. I was the keynote speaker on the 80th Anniversary of D-Day in June, 2024, at the Brittany-Normandy American Military Cemetery in France. I have been invited to speak at the 85th anniversary of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii this coming December.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
i. Go to school. Take writing classes and if you can, enroll in a writing program at a good university.
ii. Write a thousand words a day. Revise it the next day and write another thousand words.
iii. Read serious work. You don’t have to write serious work but you do have to learn how to write and, trust me, good books show you how to write – it’s all there on the page. Detective thrillers, romantic triangle novels, and science fiction fantasy stories depend on sentence and paragraph structure, the creation of credible and interesting characters, and on making your readers a part of the story every bit as much as National Book Award and Booker Prize winners. There is not that much space between Larry McMurtry stories and Trey Parker-Matt Stone stories.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jwlbooks.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jack_woodville_london/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FrenchLetters
