Today was freaking beautiful in St. Paul, MN and I decided to go on a walkabout with my camera, sort of as an exercise in meditation and attempting to be very “present” in the world around me. Not only does paying attention pay off when you’re trying to describe a scene in fiction it reminds you how transient life truly is-we’re here for a brief time and then we’re gone.

Walking around, I realized how odd someone who is truly paying attention to their environment is to other people, almost dangerous. We’re used to cameras these days but not being fully perceived and appreciated.

And lo, it is beautiful! So sayeth my cat Frenchie.

From Kirkus Reviews:

THE FIREBUG OF BALROG COUNTY
Author: David Oppegaard

Review Issue Date: June 1, 2015
Online Publish Date: May 6, 2015
Publisher:Flux
Pages: 312
Price ( Paperback ): $11.99
Publication Date: September 8, 2015
ISBN ( Paperback ): 978-0-7387-4543-5
Category: Fiction
Take one angry 18-year-old, sprinkle with zingy narrative, and add a match. Mack is mad, and he has been since his mother died three years ago after a valiant battle with cancer. He is surrounded by people who care—his mayor grandfather, the Vietnam vet; his sweet, brownie-baking grandmother; his father; his younger (and angrier) sister; and buddy Sam, orphan and philosopher—but he finds solace only in setting fires. After he torches a boathouse at the start of senior year, his inner firebug itches for more, which eventually leads to a sobering comeuppance and the beginnings of true peace. Too smart by half, Mack is appealing even when he irritates; a mix of first-person narration, almost omniscient interstitials about the county (“a territorial division…far, far away from any ocean”), and dialogue-heavy scenes propel the small story (the whole novel takes place in only two months) forward from fire to fire, flashing back to Mack’s mother’s death and detailing an unexpected but welcome relationship with local college girl Katrina (who has her own demons). Drinking, F-bombs, and humor abound, but so does a genuine sense of mourning and growth, even if Mack’s narrative sometimes smacks of adult understanding. An unusual coming of age, sparking a hot if not quite perfect conflagration. (Fiction. 14 & up)

I’ve just finished reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl-The Annotated Autobiography Ed. by Pamela Smith Hill and published by South Dakota Historical Society Press. It’s a magnificent dressing up of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography of her childhood with as many annotations as there are blades of grass on the prairie. It’d been a while since I’d read Laura’s prose and it was as refreshing as always.

Here are some of my favorite lines:

____________________

The grasshoppers had eaten all the flowers and everything so the bees could not find any honey to store for the eating in the winter. Then because they had nothing to feed them, the bees stung all their baby bees to death and threw them out of the hives.
The man nearly cried when he told about the poor bees and he said he would not stay any longer in a country where even a bee couldn’t make a living.

____________________

Little Brother was not well and the Dr. came. I thought that would cure him as it had Ma when the Dr. came to see her. But little Brother got worse instead of better and one awful day he straightened out his little body and was dead.

____________________
When Grandma was a little girl she lived in a gray house made of logs….

At night, when Grandma lay in her trundle bed, she could not hear anything at all but the sound of the trees whispering together. Sometimes, far away in the night, a wolf howled.

it was a scare-y sound. Grandma knew that wolves ate little girls.

-Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Juvenile Pioneer Girl” or “When Grandma was a Little Girl”

____________________

We were at Mr. Brown’s at eleven and were married at once with Ida Brown and Elmer McConell as witnesses.

Mr Brown had promised me not to use the word “obey” in the ceremony and he kept his word.

____________________

As the preacher was earnestly preaching a stray kitten came walking up the aisle and stood arching its back and rubbing its side against a corner of the pulpit. Just then a dog came in the door…While the dog was still hunting [the kitten], I felt a gentle swaying of my hoop skirt and looking down saw the tip of the kitten’s tail disappearing under the hem of my dress. It had taken refuge under my skirts and was climbing on the hoops on the inside, like a monkey on the bars of his cage. I had a sudden vision of the dog discovering the kitten and what the consequences might be so that I shook with silent laughter.

Mary, who had missed it all, punched me with her elbow and whispered savagely, “Behave yourself!” which didn’t help me any.

____________________

Then we drove on in some more silence until I got down at the door.

I started to go in, then stopped and asked, ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me good night.’

“I was afraid you wouldn’t like it,” he said.

Then he kissed me good night and I went in the house, not quite sure if I were engaged to Manly or to the starlight and the prairie.
___________________

When the sun set, we put the [buggy’s] top down so that the beautiful moon-drenched or star-spangled sky was directly over our heads.

The sunsets were gorgeous, flaming spectacles; the night winds were soft and sweet; little animals scurried across the road ahead of us; now and then a night bird called and once two little black and white spotted skunks played along beside the buggy as we drove slowly.

So I’m writing a non-fiction collection of essays about writing and the writing life. I know, I know. There’s already a ton of books on writing and who the hell do I think I am, busting in to write another?

Well, I don’t really have an answer for either of those questions, really. I just woke up about a month ago, considered the vacuum that existed after finishing my newest project, and decided to see if I could come up with enough stuff to say and meditate upon to put a book together.

Turns out, I have a lot I guess. The words have been pouring out of me and the collection is already closing in on a hundred pages. It’s strange, pretending I’m sort of writing expert giving writing advice and reporting back from the front, but it’s also been liberating, too, getting the process and sweat and time spent off my chest and relating my experiences during the composition, revision, and (a couple times) getting my work published. I’m finding my writing book prose voice to be a slightly more erudite version of the Blogagaard voice I’ve been using all along since I started blogging in 2005 and I’ve been reveling in the potential uses of footnotes (I get it now, DFW! They’re fun!).

We’ll see where this road leads and if it ever sees the light of day but I’m already glad I started the project, if only for the pleasure I’ve had writing it.

Oh God what hath I wrought?

Hzzaaah! I have just completed the rough draft of a new novel!

For the third time, for the same novel! Or, more accurately, now written three novels (some 1,100 pages/280,000 words) to arrive at one sharp little 270 page YA novel! Novel #15!

That’s right, pally! You heard me! On this past Tuesday night, in flurry of typing and coffee, I wrote the epilogue for a novel I’ve been working on for over a year and reattempted from near-scratch three times! And lordy it does feel good to have wrestled this dragon to the ground and, I am pretty sure at last, come up with a worthy follow-up to The Firebug of Balrog County (which hasn’t even come out yet, such is the slow cycle of the publishing industry).

I have to say this third time around (here’s the blog post I wrote about the second failed attempt six weeks ago) went as slick as melted butter. I’d already fully imagined the world in the first two novels and I’d chosen my new main character from a cast of dozens in the previous two books (basically I just went with the most interesting character-sometimes you just don’t overthink shit) and this time around I focused mainly on her and her family, with a solid plot outline in hand, so a ton of the mental mapping of this third novel was already done. I just had to sit down and bang it out and so that’s what I did-I wrote seven pages a night for six weeks straight and now here I am, there and back again like a real old school fucker.

I wouldn’t recommend this style to anybody but I’m happy with the final product and am reminded, as always, what goes on behind the scenes doesn’t really matter to anybody but the writer-the public will only see that final product and judge everything by it, as I suppose is their right.

BWAA! Now it’s time to edit.

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.

 

So I’ve returned from a trip of leisure to Miami Beach, where I visited my step dad Tom and we had ourselves a rip roaring time. Instead of writing a regular post about it I thought I’d just list some impressions I had and post some pics.

Miami Beach is an island all its own, located east of Miami across a causeway and accessed by a bridge that goes by a major shipping pier with some of the largest cranes in the world.

Tom and I spent nearly every sunset drinking at the Miami Beach VFW, which is filled with characters and has a view of downtown Miami. We also hit up Mac’s Club Deuce a few times, which is a 1920’s era dive bar and exactly as cool as you’d think (the pic of Mac’s is not mine but I did see the cool dude with the eye patch sitting exactly in that spot at the bar).

Miami Beach is a top-notch white sand beach and attracts tourists from around the world, which makes for a crazy multilingual speedo infested scene. I noted a lot of French, Italian, and Russian tourists. Everybody acts like they’re hot shit on Miami Beach-Patton Oswalt has a bit in his new special about everyone on Miami Beach being an alpha personality. The restaurants and hotels along Ocean Drive (located by the beach) are all fancy and expensive and feature stuff like $50 pitchers of mojitos.

Tom took me on a basement to roof tour of Marlin’s Park, where he works as the guy who maintains the retractable roof. Very cool work if you can get it!

We toured Little Havana, which is in Miami near the stadium. Highlights included an awesome Cuban breakfast at a local counter, drinking my first Cafe Cubano, and watching tobacco leaves get hand rolled into cigars. If you never want to sleep again I recommend two cafe cubanos and one cigar.

On my last full day in town we drove down to Key Largo and ate our weight in delicious seafood and checked out the swampy everglades.  The main highway back to Miami was fenced in on both sides to protect speeding traffic from being devoured by alligators.

Finally Tom drove me back to the airport and dropped me right into one last apocalyptic Florida sunset. Good times! It’s taken me three days to recover.

So I’ve been with my agent Jonathan for over ten years now (the fall of 2005 to be semi-exact) and over the years I’ve become familiar with the variety of slow burns that come with trying to push a book through the publication process. One particular burn occurs between the period of submitting your brand new book to your agent for the first time and waiting for him to read it, process it, and get back to you with his thoughts (like if you’re brilliant or terrible and if he thinks he can sell this particular book). Even if your agent isn’t your first reader (and right now Jonathan is my first reader) this can be about as nerve wracking as it gets.

Jonathan usually takes somewhere between 2-6 weeks to get back to me (though once two months passed, I email chided him, and he admitted he’d forgotten about whatever book that was, though give the man a break he’s read something like eleven Oppegaard novels at this point and does get back to me very quickly via email, for which I am eternally grateful. I’m serious-my NYC agent returns my emails faster than almost every friend I have, though he gets hundreds a day). During this waiting period it would probably be wise for me to move on to the next project but usually I can only muster up a couple pages of short fiction, if that, and generally use the time to catch up on reading and generally fuck around (like this new rebooted website!). Also, I’ll admit, after this past book my mind has been cleared out and I only have a vague notion of where I should go next.

So during this restless time, which generally makes or breaks a year or more of very isolated work for me (and low grade shitty apartment living) I return again and again to the book in my mind and reassess it in a sharp Jonathan-type way, which I can still only guess at, and hope I brought the literary thunder loud enough and that he’ll see the book my way, which is inevitably with rose colored glasses.

And then I drink, for the publishing pit waits, and the digestion is slowwwwwwwwwwwwwww…