Winning & Blegging

I can barely believe that almost the whole month of November has already shot by. I was all giddy to get started with National Novel Writing Month back on the 1st, a Tuesday. It was just about all I could do to wait until midnight on Monday night to start writing, but it worked out for me. I got to 50,000 words last night, and validated the word count for my second NaNoWriMo win in a row. It was the wee hours of the 28th, but for me it was still the 27th, so I count that as having gotten to 50,000 words three days early—better than last year by two days. By every conceivable metric, it was a better NaNoWriMo for me this year than it was last year.

Unfortunately, what I have now is a scattershot sort of manuscript that bounces all the over the place and pretty much completely lacks cohesion. I kept making up new sections as I went along, going with whatever thread felt like it was going to bring forth words each night when I sat down to write—but I’m sort of excited about taking what I have now and weaving it into something coherent. It has many of the elements that I have tried (and failed) to write about in the past, including college and the Mafia; but there are also things I’ve never even thought of writing about before, like one character who went to Japan as a foreign exchance student and wound up getting heavily involved in the burgeoning ramen trend—and she might wind up having a brush with the Yakuza too, I’m not sure.

And what’s sort of funny is that I wound up writing much less about Irvington than I would have guessed was possible for a book that I intended to be a long novel about Irvington. Part of that is because I’m still trying to work out how I want Irvington to operate as a character in the story, part of it is because I still need to figure out how each of the things that are important to me about Irvington fit into the larger story, and the last bit of it is that I need to gather more information on the darker side of Irvington. I have made a small amount of progress on that front by getting books out of the library; but I have also run into problems in that regard, too.

I have so far been unable to find well-written books about haunted places in Irvington and Indiana; and it happens that my luck is actualy getting worse. I’ve read the Irvington Haunts books a couple of times each now, and the writing in those books, while not remotely good, is at least passable. Where my luck has gotten worse is with a book called Haunted Backroads: Central Indiana (and other stories), by Nicole R. Kobrowski. The writing in this book is actively bad and completely inconsistent. The Kobrowski book and both volumes of the Irvington Haunts books list Westfield, Indiana, as their publication address, which does little to raise my opinion of the wasteland that is Hamilton County. This is where the blegging part comes in: I would love to read some books about haunted places in Indiana generally and Irvington specifically, and I would love for those books also to be well-written. If anyone out there knows of any books that fit both categories, I would love to hear from you in the comments section.

I have two others that I got from the library last week: Haunted Travels of Indiana, by Mark Marimen; and Hoosier Hauntings, by K.T. MacRorie. Neither of them is published out of Westfield, Indiana, so I guess there’s that; and neither of them is very long, either. There is also a series called Haunted Hoosier Trails that I plan to look into, but if these other two are disappointing, I may have to give up on that for awhile.