This past week I was down in New Ulm, MN for Bock Fest at the Schell’s Brewing Company in New Ulm, MN. The temperature fluctuated from 2-5 degrees with winds of around 15 mph.  BeeerAdvocate states that “Bock beer in general is stronger than your typical lager, more of a robust malt character with a dark amber to brown hue” and “Basically, this beer was a symbol of better times to come and moving away from winter”. We were in line for the fest by 10 AM and it lasted until 4 PM.

I attended with Steve, Bob, Leatha, and Erica. In the background there is the Beer Fairy who sticks a heated firebrand in your bock and carmalizes the sugar in it, making it double tasty (he had his beard braided into four braids and he said it took him only 15 min to do this, which I thought was pretty good). I once got the same mug double carmalized as it was even better (I drank from a 32 ounce (1 L) Bubba mug, which I saw many, many people using to keep their beer from freezing. My mug is standing on that stump in the above pictures with a Fargo Brewing Company sticker on it.

The plentiful bucolic grounds were open for a medallion hunt. I walked a mile or two into the woods alone right as the festival was opening so it was still quiet and peaceful out there, with only the wind and the sound of your own breathing for company. I didn’t find a medallion but I did see three deer frolicking together, unaware of me, which was even better.

The grounds are big and beautiful-the festival was basically spread out in three main layers along the sloping river bluff Schell’s is parked on. I had a hard time imagining a more beautifully placed brewery. I grew up near New Ulm and had been to the city before but I’d never seen the brewery. The extreme cold added a certain survivalist jaunty air to the proceedings and as I listened to the crowd around me I noticed a similar very south central MN sense of humor that my own sense of humor is deeply rooted in-I might be a St. Paul city boy now but I felt a sense of homecoming that I’ve never really felt any of the handful of times I’ve visited my hometown since graduating high school. On the drunk bus back to Mankato, where I was staying that night with my peeps, we stopped at a bar in Nicolett and as I reentered a building with actual heat in it I felt like I’d returned from a Jack London novel to a strange world of line dancing.

By my own estimates I drank roughly 140 ounces of Bock beer over the course of the long, glorious day.

Behold, the Dragon of Editing has come upon me once more with fiery breath and mighty talons! My agent has gotten back to me on the new project (see previous post) and…gah too many loose ends! The book’s setting holds great promise and the bones of…something…are there but No, I threw too many plates in the air.

How so? Well…

The book has basically six points of view. Five main characters living in the present and one living in the 1850’s. My agent pointed out that he didn’t know who exactly to root for and…he was right, damn it. The problem is with so many points of view I was already looking ahead to the next chapter, worried about keeping the plot(s) flowing, and I never really had enough space to develop each character fully. To do this the book would need to be more like 900 pages (instead of 400) and yeah, fuck that! Plus, the plot really doesn’t need 900 pages anyway…which could be said of every plot devised by basically every writer other than Tolstoy whoever wrote a book that long.

So what do I do now, you ask? After rewriting a 420 page novel from scratch and coming up with a fresh 380 page version? Do I claw my eyes out and scream the silent scream of the damned? Mmm, tempting…but no.

I’m going to rewrite the rewrite! I’m going to focus on one character from the earlier novels, shift from a general adult audience to horror YA, and come up with a plot pared down to the bone and as mean as Dick Cheney in a tickle fight. On my side, beside my own craziness, is the fact that after 230,000 words of effort I’ve truly developed a world (a town called Hawthorn) and I have a slew of material to draw on (I’ve retitled the file for the rewritten novel, the one my agent read, as simply FODDER and plan to pull entire chapters from it and punch them up to my new purpose-though this could be even more work than writing everything from scratch).

So here I go again, rewriting the rewrite. You either ride the Dragon of Editing or it eats you for a light snack…Postscript: This 3rd time around I’ve already created an entire plot outline and read it to my agent line by line over the phone, just to make sure we were on the same page. I figure if I’m crossing over a thousand from-scratch pages on this baby it doesn’t hurt to be certain.