Fall Plans

So I am getting together my plans for this fall.

Let it be known that October shall be beer making month. I am planning on brewing a parti-gyle batch in the beginning of October. Parti-gyle just means that you make two beers with the same grains in the same mash: one a high gravity beer from the first runnings and the second runnings make a lower gravity beer. I will be making a spiced winter warmer as the high alcohol beer and an ordinary bitter as the session beer. Both are fairly English in character. So as soon as I can spare some funds to buy 22 pounds of Maris Otter, I will be a-brewin'. I also hope to get a porter or stout made later in the month, so maybe I should just get the 50 lb bag and be set for a while. I also want to make an ice beer at some point, but this can be an extract batch. You make a high alcohol beer like a barleywine and then quasi-distill it by freezing out some of the water content. This takes a 10ish percent beer and concentrates it to around 20ish percent. The result (due to the lack of carbonation and higher alcohol mainly) is supposed to be more like a spirit instead of a beer, but it is totally legal to make at home.

I want all this done by Halloween because I will need all of November if I hope to do NaNoWriMo again this year. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Basically you begin writing November 1st with the goal of writing a 50,000 word novel (about 175 pages) by midnight, November 30. It is a very tough challenge. I didn't even attempt last year since we had just moved in and were still getting over the flood. The furthest I have gotten in the past was 18,000 words which got me to chapter 6. Last year 119,301 people made the attempt and 21,683 completed at least 50,000 words. My friend Ben completed it as well, so I know it can be done. From my past experiences I know that the toughest part for me is not proofing and editing as I write. I really need to just spit out everything I am thinking onto the page and leave the editor hat on it's peg until the month is over. At this point I have no idea what I will write about, but it will probably end up as contemporary fantasy.

So I now have goals for this fall. Hopefully I will get them done