Les Bon Temps

Last Saturday, we drove into New Orleans at sunset while listening to Tom Waits and feeling absurdly jealous of ourselves.  The next four and a half days were magical. 

We watched a wedding party parade along Bourbon Street, complete with brass band, waving handkerchiefs, and elaborate bride-and-groom umbrellas.  We had an amazing dinner at the Green Goddess, where I spotted chef Chris DeBarr at work in the steamy kitchen (to me, a celebrity sighting of the first magnitude).  We saw nuns in full habits strolling up Royal Street, and crosses made of human bone at the voodoo museum.  After mass at St. Louis Cathedral, I bought a chaplet of red glass beads that look just like pomegranate seeds.   We ate beignets and pain au chocolat with chicory coffee.  We had Sazeracs at the Napoleon House and absinthe in Pirate Alley, among the ghosts of Faulkner and Williams and Capote.  And we wandered for hours in the cemeteries, miniature cities of the dead. 


(Me, in front of the house where Faulkner wrote his first novel.)


(In Lafayette Cemetery Number 2.)

To add to the magic, just before we left the city, I learned that The Books of Elsewhere, Volume One: The Shadows had won a Cybils Award in the fantasy/science fiction category:  www.cybils.com/2011/02/winners-of-the-2010-cybils-awards.html.  I couldn't be more grateful.  Thank you, Cybils bloggers.

And, in other long-delayed awards news, The Shadows has been named a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards in the young people's literature category:www.thefriends.org/programs/mnbookawards/award_winners_and_finalists.html#finalists.  This also means that during the month of March, book-loving Minnesotans can vote for it (or for one of the other, magnificent, finalists of their choice) to win the Readers' Choice Award: www.thefriends.org/programs/mnbookawards/mba_gala.html#readers_choice.

After all this wonderfulness, I'm waiting for the big karmic boom.  For now, though, I'm on Cloud Nine.