Sunday, May 13, 2012

Writing, some...

I've been doing a bit of writing lately, although not as much as I should.  I still haven't shook this cough, but I did go and get a pertussis vaccination (for whooping cough).

Friday night, I made a huge pot of tortilla soup heavy on the heat (chili heat) and made with home-made chicken broth.  I slept a lot too this weekend.  And I'm feeling much better.  Which means I feel more like writing.

The New Orleans story is taking on a life of its own.  Finally.  You know that everything's starting to come together when you can see the characters.  So far, there are really only six characters in this story, but they're all larger than life.

-- Janice is the protagonist, the main person, and everything revolves around her.
-- Brad is the man she's in love with.
-- And then there's her Momma, who we never meet, but whose presence plays large in what happens in the story.  I know, you say, Momma seems to be in all of your stories.  She is Rose, the grandmother in Counting Crows, and now she's the mother in this story.  All true, but get over it.  This is my therapy, not yours.

There are also three outsiders:  Madam Marie, Antoinette, and T-Bo.

I have gotten to where I can see each and everyone of them. 

Janice is a pretty girl--actually at age thirty, she's a woman, but she seems/acts more like a girl.  She's nothing special, you probably wouldn't look twice at her, which has made her a bit of a wallflower, but she has powers of attraction that she's totally unaware of. All she needs is a little self confidence.

Brad isn't a bad person.  He's a very good looking guy, but he's ego-centric, concerned about himself more than anyone else.  He likes to party and be the center of attention, not a satellite around someone else's gravity pool.

I could write reams about Momma.  She's a lot like Brad.  The word narcisst comes to mind.  Janice is just there to be a mirror, to reflect Momma's perfection. 

Madam Marie and Antoinette, both work at Laveau Botanicals.  They are polar opposites.  Good vs. bad.  Fat vs. thin.  Motherly vs. Momma-ish.

And then there's T-Bo.  I just brought him into the story.  He's a good ol' boy who runs a gumbo shop called Cooyon's.  In Cajun, cooyon indicates a dumb, ridiculous, or silly person.  His shop is called Cooyon's because when he first opened, his pére said only a cooyon would be dumb enough to eat in a dump like that when there was beaucoup better places.

I won't say how T-Bo fits into the story, but he is a key factor in how it ends.

Oh, and how could I forget Pischouette, the cat that adopts Janice. [In Cajun, pischouette means mischievous little girl.] So I guess there's seven characters in my story.


For more on Cajun slang like cooyon, visit: http://louisianacajunslang.com/language.html
[Beware.  The damned cooyon put a bunch of wav files on the site, and it takes forever to load.  Also, he spells it couyon, but most of the places I've seen it, the word has been spelled cooyon.]

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