I promised my friend Kristy that I’d keep a food journal during my recent trip to New Orleans. I was lucky enough to have a travel companion who likes to walk as much as I do and I even ran two mornings, so I actually feel like I balanced all the eating with some good exercise. We probably walked a total of 7 hours over 4 days.. it was quite nice.

But I digress.. on to the food!

Acme Oyster House – Iberville St., French Q.
Classic, down home Cajun cooking. I recommend the grilled oyster appetizer and the crawfish etouffee. Delicious. They put oysters on the half shell on the grill, top them with garlic butter and Romano cheese and serve it with French bread. You can get six or twelve.. definitely enough for a full meal. The etouffee was very good, though I’m not well-versed in them. The restaurant is loud and bar-like and considering most of the restaurants in the French Quarter rank higher on the pricey scale, it was a nice first choice.

Emeril’s New Orleans – Tchoupitoulas St., Warehouse District
Emeril has three restaurants in New Orleans. We chose this one because it happened to be in the same neighborhood as our hotel. You definitely need reservations, so call ahead. If you’re willing to sit down to dinner at six, when they open, you’ll probably have no trouble getting a table. Beyond that, it’s packed.

I had the BBQ shrimp appetizer, a mixed spinach salad and the redfish. I’m told both the BBQ shrimp and the redfish have been on the menu since they opened. I can attest that they both are delicious. The bbq sauce has a nice zing you’d expect from Emeril and the redfish was perfectly cooked. For dessert, I had the lemon torte, but they also have a dessert cheese menu, which looked quite nice. It’s pricey, so be prepared. They have a nice wine list and our waiter, Dimitrious, was phenomenal.

Some random diner – Decatur St., across from the French Market
We ate here for breakfast one morning when the line at Cafe Du Monde was too long. They’re a diner, so the whole menu is fair game all day. They have the standards, eggs, pancakes, french toast, but I had a muffaletta.. piled with olive tapenade, cheese and meats, fries on the side. Awesome breakfast! They don’t use Heinz ketchup and since there’s no other ketchup brand in my book, I doused mine with Tabasco for a kick. Made it all better!

Cafe Du Monde – Decatur St., French Market
A classic and a must. Hot beignets and cafe au lait on ice. Consistently amazing. Just don’t wear black, because the powdered sugar goes everywhere.

Creole Skillet – Julia St., Warehouse District
Our final meal was Sunday Brunch. The French onion soup, with a bit of a kick, was covered in cheese. I also had the seafood crepes filled with crawfish and shrimp. The crepes were a bit dense for my liking and the sauce was a little bland. Salt, pepper and a couple shots of Tabasco fixed it. I ended up eating the middles out of two of the three crepes.

Bottom line: The only thing I didn’t eat was an oyster Po Boy, which is going to be first on the list if I ever return. You’d better bring some walking shoes, because you really will eat your way through town. Even the sub-standard restaurants serve good food. And if worse comes to worse, there’s Tabasco on every table. And Tabasco can pretty much fix anything.

Hannah: Erin, what is your favorite band ever?
Me: Oh man, that’s a really tough question. But I suppose if the criteria for a “favorite band ever” is that I can listen to a majority of their albums start to finish, I’d have to say The Police. But that’s a really tough question because it depends on my mood.
Hannah: Hmmm (Singing) Roxane, you don’t have to turn on the red light.

I have to research the West Virginia felony arrest procedures and Circuit court system and I keep singing the “Jubilation T. Cornpone” number from L’il Abner.

Don’t ask me why.

I went to the opthamologist today to have my eyes checked.

My grandfather, who was a wonderful human being, infected most of my family with Granular Corneal Dystrophy. If it sounds like a horrible degenerative disease, it’s because it is. It’s a funny looking eye disease – like someone took orange and red crayons and colored the surface of my cornea with little dots. When light shines through the dots, I’m blinded. Night driving and really bright sunshine on snow are the worst, but lights on a rainy night are pretty bad too. Most of the aunts and uncles have had cornea transplants and I think all but two cousins have it as well. Not pretty.

Anyway, this is a long preamble to the real story and that is that I saw a specialist today to make sure my eyeballs are on the up and up. I go to the optometrist every year. I’m not afraid of eye exams. I hate the puff of air, but I manage.

So when the eye doctor tech numbed my eyes and told me he was going to test for glaucoma, I thought, piece of cake.

Um, yeah.

They don’t do the puff of air. They put your chin in a contraption, tell you to look at a black disc and then attempt to touch your eyeball with a blue glowing cone. And that’s where I get off the train.

He says, don’t worry you won’t feel anything. Open wide and try not to blink.

Of course, the first thing I do IS blink and then I feel my eyelashes hit the glowing blue cone. And then my head explodes. I break out into a cold sweat, the tunnel vision starts and I almost pass out in the contraption. He never does touch my eye. But like a nice little helper, he does fetch me some water.

Rick, who is there to drive me home, tries to get me to focus on anything but the blue cone that is rapidly approaching my eyeball, to no avail. Think about your book, he says. (Now as an aside, that would normally work, but since the only thing I could think of was the dead body of my victim splayed out on the ME’s table, it didn’t really help..)

I decided that I’d rather have antennae, instead of eyeballs, which are viscous and weird and probably really gross when they’re not in your head. Rick does not agree.

I am happy to report that I did not pass out and that the doctor did successfully administer the test. He held my eyelids open so that they wouldn’t touch the cone and send me into shock.

This, my friends, is the difference between a seasoned doctor and an eye doctor tech who is afraid to touch you. Whatever, I’m a dork. I just don’t want someone touching my eyeball.

But you could touch my antennae. I’d let you.

What the heck happened to the week? I had grand plans of writing every night and it never happened. I have a critique meeting next weekend and have nothing to submit. I need to get some self-discipline.

So.. I’ve decided to apply for my PhD. Not like I have nothing else to do in my life, but my reasons are three fold:

1. I’m now ready to go back to school. I’m going to apply to GMU’s program in History and New Media. So it’s somewhat career relevant.

2. I really don’t want to have to take the GRE again and I want to at least apply before my scores are 10 years old.

3. The application deadline is Jan 15th. I want to submit the first three chapters of my book to a contest that has a deadline of November. If I am accepted to the program, I won’t be able to start until Sept 2010 because of the way the school year works. (You still with me through my logic flow??) SO that means that if I can get at least half the book done by December (nice goal – I’ve got almost 3 chapters now) and then the rest done by the time I enter school (positive thinking) then I’ll have my novel done AND be a PhD student. This will allow me to shop it around without worrying about how I’m going to fill the time (which can take upwards of 6 months) while I wait to hear back from prospective agents.

In essence, I’m giving myself externally imposed deadlines.

Then if I sell the book and they want another, I’ve got a nice little dilemma. But I can’t get too far ahead of myself. First I have to find the time to write the damn thing!

Me: Oh really?
Hannah: Yeah, Dad, don’t underestimate her. She knows what she’s doing.
Rick: What do you know?
Hannah: Well, I’m twelve and a girl. So I know.

She walks out and we both collapse in hysterics.

As a murder mystery writer, I struggle with finding a strong enough motive for murder. Is that particular motive believable? Or is this one stronger for murder?

I’ve spoken to several homicide detectives and they say that i’d be surprised at what prompts someone to kill another. The motives behind such deeds are usually incredibly weak. But we also know that, as writers, we can’t rely on real life to help us. Often times, what flies in real life would never fly in a book. “Totally unrealistic,” they’d say.

For example, I find it totally unbelievable that a doctor might murder his wife and that that woman’s father might freak out and hire a hit man to take the doctor out? What if a random robber happened to kill the doctor, and the police happened to kill the robber for resisting arrest? Sounds totally implausible, but Thomas Thompson relays this true crime story in his book, Blood and Money. Frankly, I don’t think that would fly in fiction.

It’s a challenge.. to come up with something believable enough for fiction, but not too crazy that the suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part is impossible.

Now, I hate mouth sounds. You know the chomping, slurping, gulping, swallowing sounds that most people make when they eat. Especially in the morning. I hate listening to other people eat. Often I eat breakfast by myself, but when I do have to eat with other noisy humans, I turn on the radio to drown them out. This morning, I forgot to turn on the radio.. and I’ve been annoyed ever since breakfast.

I laughed during Chicago, when the Six Merry Murderesses of the Cook County Jail sang the Cell Block Tango because one of them killed her husband for popping his gum. Maybe if I were as off-center in the brain chemistry department, such a thing would send me over the edge too. I get the impulse. Believe me.

But I’m fine with the radio and with eating alone. I guess that is what separates me from those people who really do lose it. That and a properly functioning Prefrontal Cortex.

But thank god for fiction. It allows us to mine these differences. And hopefully come up with a decent story line in the process.

Honestly, I have no idea.

I’ve been told only to create suspects who have legitimate and plausible motives and opportunities to kill the victim. I’ve done that. I’ve done that to the point where I have two characters who could possibly have “done” it. But I have no idea which one actually did. I’m hoping that as I write more, it’ll take shape in my mind’s eye and the answer will slap me upside the head.

Here’s to hoping I get slapped upside the head…

Hi. My name is Erin and I’m a mystery writing newb.

I have a list of characters. I know what they look like; I know their history. I know that in sixth grade, one of them fell of a jungle gym and broke her arm in two places. I like these people.

Now, none of them really exist. They’re all figments of my imagination. But I’ve spent quite a bit of time with them. And it’s becoming crystal clear to me that for the sake of my story, I’m going to have to kill off a couple that I wasn’t planning to kill and/or I’ll have to seriously destroy the lives of a character or two.

And I’m having trouble with this.

I don’t want to “hurt” them. I don’t want them to be unhappy. I just want what’s best for them and for them to live out their days in my fictional little town with their fictional lives and their fictional dogs and fictional white picket fences.

But I’m going to have to do some serious messing. I might even have to knock off one or two.

So I’m bummed. Before you take me off to my padded cell, let me mourn a bit longer. I know these people. I’ve earned it.

I love traveling. But I luurrve coming home. So in honor of my first weekend home in like, ages, I’m going to do all of the following this weekend:

~ SLEEP. I plan on sleeping until noon tomorrow.
~ CLEAN. My floor is disgusting, as are my bathrooms, so I’ll probably do some light cleaning.
~ WORKOUT. Because of all the rain, I’ve yet to start my handy six-week Stop My Ass from Expanding running plan. I hope to start it this weekend and do some real exercise.
~ WRITE. I’m so behind on my writing targets. Plus I signed up for a Writer’s Digest Mystery class and I’m going to take the first one online tonight. I have much writing and outlining to catch up on.
~ TARGET. I miss Target. I’ll just wander around the aisles and see what’s new the world of retail.
~ GRILL. I’m sick of restaurant food, so there will be much grilled goodies consumed.
~ PETS AND HUSBANDS AND SONS. My pets are mad at me and the boys in my house haven’t seen me, so I’ll find some quality time. Plus Sunday is Mother’s Day and I heard some rumblings last night of “big plans”, so I figure I’ll get good Joshua time in.
~ MY MOTHER. I foresee a facial in my future. Yippee.

Now, don’t ask me to do anything else. Can’t you see I’m busy?