I'm 8,000 words into Crescent City Murder, book 8 in the Jill Quint series. I'm loving the story and enjoying my writing and learning more about New Orleans as story quirks arise. But a word of caution, never, ever, sit next to me in a bar.
When I visited there last fall, I tried to talk to as many people as possible about life in New Orleans. It's my way of soaking up the culture with the thought of material for a future book. I spoke with my servers in restaurants, my bartender at Juan's Flying Burrito, a woman on a trolley who had just come from a funeral, a forensic pathologist at the city coroner's office, Uber drivers, and many more. A man that spoke with me at a bar will end up dead in book 8.
It was a Sunday night and the Green Bay Packers were playing the New York Giants and I was sitting at the bar at Archie Manning's Place to watch the game. A young man sat next to me at the bar and we chatted off and on over the next couple of hours. He lives in the Ninth Ward, that region of New Orleans that suffered the most from Hurricane Katrina. He has a son that he shares with the child's mother and he worked in Baton Rouge. He explained why he commuted to that city and what it was like to live through Katrina.
I don't know why I ended up killing him as opposed to anyone else I met in NOLA. I guess his story visually impacted my brain as I could see the struggles of this nice man both now and in the past. His words were still on my mind when I visited the Hurricane Katrina museum the next day. Again his struggles of that time played on my brain so that I was imagining him during the video segments of the hurricane that played inside the museum. He felt that the government had not protected the Ninth Ward and they had purposely flooded it by blowing up the canal dykes to save the French Quarter, the large source of tourism dollars. Based on what other residents said and the explanation for the depth of the damage at the museum, I came away with disagreeing with his opinion.
Or maybe it's his fault for sitting next to me at the bar distracting me from a Packers' game…Never sit next to me at a bar…during a Packer game, unless you're going to be quiet and cheer for the Pack!
