John Wood

I'm an author, writer, and former magazine editor based in Las Vegas. Born in 1948, I grew up in Pasadena, California. After high school I enlisted in the Army and served in Vietnam and Japan.

After the Army I went to UCLA where I rowed crew, joined Sigma Chi, and wrote humor and sports for the Daily Bruin. After graduating, I tried my hand at sportswriting, travel articles, humor, novels, screenplays, and sitcoms. A spec script for "Archie Bunker's Place" got me my first agent. A travel piece about a seedy bar in Tahiti called the One Chicken Inn got me my first magazine byline. After working as a publications editor at Prudential, I went to AARP where I became senior articles editor for Modern Maturity (now AARP the Magazine), the largest-circulation magazine in the world.

​​A special report I oversaw at the magazine in 1991 garnered our first National Magazine Award nomination. After years of getting reject letters from editors (who never tell you why they reject your work), I was now behind the editor's desk where writers sent me hundreds of query letters each week. Most deserved to be rejected, and I suddenly knew why. So in 1996 I published How to Write Attention-Grabbing Query & Cover Letters (Writers Digest Books), which details what every query must contain (the 10 Query Commandments) and what no query must ever contain (the 10 Query Sins).​

In 2001 I left AARP to write full time. Since then I've sold travel and humor pieces to such publications as National Geographic Traveler, Islands, Expedia Travels, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Newsday, and the lead piece in Not So Funny When It Happened: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure (Travelers' Tales).

In 2014 I published two Amazon Kindle ebooks. The first was Saigon Tease: So, What Did You Do in Nam, Dad? It's an emotional and sometimes silly memoir of budding love, anguish and wonder, and a few dollops of terror as I evolved from boy to man during the pivotal war of my generation. In 2015 the Global Ebook Awards awarded it the Silver Medal in its Nonfiction - Autobiography/Memoir category.

The second was How I Killed Off My Ex-Wife and Other Far-Flung Misadventures, a collection of all my blunders and escapades around the world, from posing for Playgirl to losing (and winning) on The Dating Game, to being held as a spy in Cuba to offing my ex-wife in Saigon. In 2015 the Wishing Shelf Book Awards awarded it the Red Ribbon Winner.

In 2010 I decided to veer off course for the ultimate challenge. The happiest period of my life was during the Army when I got the opportunity to immerse myself into two different cultures. I've always wanted to experience that wonder again. So at 62 I volunteered for the Peace Corps and was sent to the Philippines​ to teach English. I racked up enough misadventures there (can you say "dengue fever"?) to publish my third book, Dispatches from Paradise: Two Years in the Land of Smiles, as an Amazon Kindle ebook and paperback.