November 24

New Orleans

I am slack-jawed and speechless. I simply had no idea.

When I said I'd been to New Orleans, I meant Mardi Gras, which I now believe doesn't really count. For three days I gallivanted about the French Quarter under the guidance of Utahna Faith--a wrimo extraordinaire, who for no good reason showed me the best damned time a novel writing fool could hope for in New Orleans.

Pulling into town on a Friday afternoon, I met up with Utahna at House of Brews for a bout of nanowriting. She's working on a flash fiction novel based in the French quarter and has been scaling the twisty path toward being a "real" writer for the past year or two.

Friday to Monday is a jumble. We wrote, we drank, we rambled through the cobbled streets of the French Quarter at 4 am amidst sticky fog. We wrote some more. We talked about favorite authors. I rooted through used bookstores in search of a German encyclopedia of mythology hoping to find the legend of doppelgangers. I ate beignets. I drank cafe au laits. I admired the long fronds of hanging ferns. I listened to live gospel in a music store that handed out beer at the door. And later we danced to the blues. We danced to Dixie.

We spent hours sipping honeydew melon martinis at a bar called the Spotted Cat. We slept 'till noon. At a Faulkner House reading, we met writers of grander and had books signed. We listened to them read while curled up on velvet couches. We hung out at a bar called Molly's. It was my last day, my last glass of wine in New Orleans and I wondered in earnest if Toulouse-Lautrec might not come through the door because that's the sort of thing that happens in New Orleans.

And then it was Monday. It was time to hit the road, so I climbed into the little red nanomobile and sped across the swamps of Louisiana toward Baton Rouge.