I do love researching Louisiana, even if and when it leads me down a rabbit hole as it always does. I’ve been trying–and it really isn’t necessary–to find out of you can actually leave the New Orleans metropolitan area without crossing a bridge; I-10 east and west require bridges (west is the wetlands/swamp alongside Lake Pontchartrain, going east you cross the lake) and of course the Causeway to the North Shore is also a bridge across the lake. Obviously you need a bridge to cross the river (there are two, the Crescent City Connection and the Huey P. Long Bridge), which leaves the old River Road, which for years was the only way into or out of New Orleans without crossing a bridge as it follows the levees up the river to Baton Rouge. I’ve never actually taken the River Road so I can’t swear that there are no bridges on its path alongside the river going north; I’ve been trying to get the answer by using Google Maps and Earth rather than taking the time to drive all the way out there and see for myself. The trick is, of course, the Bonne Carré Spillway; according to the maps the road is inside the spillway, so if the spillway is opened I believe New Orleans would have no dry land exits in any direction. I want to include this in my book, but…I also don’t want to have to take the drive to find out for sure, either.
And if I get it wrong, of course I’ll hear about it.
I am back into the office on a Monday for the first time in a very long time; I feel good this morning. I woke up long before the alarm and stayed in bed until the alarm went off, but I do feel remarkably rested all the same. We’ll see how this shift in work days feels later in the week, won’t we? But so far it feels good.
The Saints did win yesterday; for some reason I thought the game was last night instead of in the afternoon so I was reading in my chair when Paul came downstairs and mentioned that the game was on and it seemed like an exciting one–so I tuned in just in time to see the closing two minutes of the Saints’ second win on the season. I’m glad, though, I didn’t watch–from all reports it sounded like the kind of exciting and thrilling game that is inevitably an emotional rollercoaster, and after the disastrous LSU game on Saturday I don’t think I could have handled a close, exciting Saints game on top of it anyway, so it was just as well. I did get some writing done yesterday–nowhere near as much as was necessary and needed, so yay, still behind! Woo-hoo!–and then we watched our shows last evening. I enjoyed the new episodes of The Serpent Queen (now deviating from the actual historical story), House of the Dragon, Interview with the Vampire, and an episode of The Midnight Club (which, interestingly enough, is turning the stories the terminally ill teens tell each other into adaptations of other Christopher Pike stories, which is really clever) before retiring to bed relatively early last evening.
Ugh, just looking at my inbox is giving me the vapors. Hopefully I’ll make some good progress on that as well as my to-do list; which I made last week and nothing is crossed off of it, which doesn’t bode well for me or anyone or anything for that matter. But here’s hoping I can start making progress tonight or tomorrow.
Watching Interview with the Vampire, as well as rereading the book, has sent me down some mental wormholes as well. I actually wound up digging up copies of my vampire writings from the past (for teh record: the novellas “The Nightwatchers” and “Blood on the Moon,” and my novel Need), which aren’t terrible (I really need to stop defaulting to all my old work is terrible because it’s not); I had in fact forgotten a lot about them, to be honest. I just read the beginnings of all three to get some sort of idea of what I had done and was like, oh, wow, I didn’t remember this character or I’d forgotten this was set during Carnival and so on. So I am hoping that rereading them won’t be painful and will remind me of some other things that I wanted to work on; I was always disappointed that I never got to do a follow-up to Need–I’d created what I thought was an interesting paranormal mythology that I really wanted to explore more, but never got the chance.
Maybe when I retire?
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines.
Queer and Loathing in America 