author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

From the Amtrak to the BX, from the station straight to work. John and I just got back this morning on a train from Chicago, having spent a fantastically action-packed Memorial Day weekend there. A night spent in sleeping accommodations meant we were well-rested and ready to get back to our respective jobs pretty much the moment we pulled in.

For both of us, since May 17, our respective jobs are primarily in downtown Boulder. Which is to say: John took a position with a small programming start-up in a location he can bus, bike, or even walk to (in good weather and with 45 minutes to spare), and I happily rearranged my own writing routine such that I accompany him there most days. He goes to the office, and I go to some place quiet and endowed with electrical outlets and wi-fi. Maybe I do my Morning Pages on a bench by the creek, maybe pull out the laptop and do some freewriting, until the Boulder Public Library opens at 10:00. (Once I gave into temptation and spent the pre-library hour at Tee & Cakes. Hard on the wallet. Easy on the yummm.) Maybe I spend the hours until lunch working on Demand Studios articles in the upstairs quiet zone. Maybe I meet John for lunch, if he has time. Maybe we try a downtown establishment with an interesting lunch special. Maybe we make lunch. (I bought bento boxes! I want to fill them up with Stuff!) Maybe I go to Atlas Purveyors for the afternoon stretch, working on short stories and blogging gigs if there's time.

That's a lot of maybe. The definitely is, I go to work. And I work.

It helps to leave the house to go to work; I don't end up running errands or cleaning the house or chasing the cats instead of writing. It helps even more to leave in the company of someone who's heading to work himself. Self-discipline is largely a matter of mindset, and the morning go-to-work routine changes a mindset. Also, this is my first time since 2004 working roughly in the same location as my husband; I'd forgotten how much I'd missed commuting together, going to lunch together, simply being nearby rather than at opposite ends of a highway.

Today, we got off the BX, walked to his office, stowed our luggage, and then went our separate ways: he to renew his Diet Coke supply, me to order a pot of pu erh at Atlas. I had a lot to do, so it was best to spend the day all in one place. Atlas are very hospitable to all-day work sessions, even bums like me who buy one pot of tea and re-steep it all day long.

(Atlas recently got a hilariously absurd negative review on Yelp.com. The owner blew it up, printed it out, and enshrined it on the wall-to-wall chalkboard for all to enjoy.)

It felt weird how normal everything felt today, being back in Boulder, getting back to work. I mean, last night I went to sleep somewhere in Nebraska. Yesterday morning I woke up in Chicago. I guess traveling has to bring you back home sometime, but the transition was so seamless that I barely noticed it, making Boulder feel a strange place to be.

Then I thought, "You know what's really weird? That 'normal' means calling this cafe my office for the day, watching people walk by, writing stories half the day and paid article gigs the other half. And calling somewhere else my office tomorrow."

Then things got really circular. I stopped thinking and went back to writing.

Today's fiction task: write down the zombie story I've been entertaining in my head all weekend long. If you followed the links above, you'll have found one to Tee & Cakes's short story contest (here's their original announcement). The three words that were the story prompt put me in mind of nothing so much as Popcap.com's "Plants vs. Zombies" game (though I admit playing it during any downtime with John this weekend helped). So it's a bit of a pastiche on that, and a bit of a spoof on popular expectations about the inevitable zombie apocalypse. It also incorporates something I learned about chickens a couple weeks ago at Abbondanza.

The result is now in Tee & Cakes's inbox. If it doesn't make the cut, I think I just might send it to Weird Tales.

And that's the news.

I'm sure I've used that as a blog title before. But, so? Every day is the first day of the rest of your life. You get do-overs.

Today was good. Only, writing two articles for Demand Studios takes at least forty-five minutes longer than it should. Right now, there are writers complaining in the DS forum about how few titles they're allowed to have in their queue at a time because they would like to write more than their current average of 60 articles in a week. I don't know how they do it. Seriously. It took me 3.25 hours just to write two. I guess if I worked 8 hours a day on nothing but DS articles, that's how I'd do 60 articles a week. But I don't want to. I've also got some 3rd-party blogging to do (oh hai Metaverse Tribune, I'm in ur Second Life bein kloo-less!). And, oh yeah, a novel draft to finish and short stories to revise and put in the mail.

In the end, today only about 1 hour of my 5 went to the novel. I spent it mostly making notes.

In the second half of November, I started jumping around the novel's chronology, mainly because I wanted to write the end of the book before the month was out. 50,000 words wasn't going to be a problem. The problem was how many words it took to get Melissa out of elementary school. NaNoWriMo philosophy holds that you should make 49,999 and 50,000 be "The" and "End" because you can't count on the momentum to keep itself rolling into December. Except skipping around the book in order to make that happen doesn't leave me all that much better off. I am missing a lot of material from Melissa's college years and beyond, and I don't even know what shape it's supposed to be.

So I've been rereading and taking notes as I go. Essentially, I've been performing Holly Lisle's One Pass Manuscript Revision method on an unfinished first draft. I'm hoping that by the time I get to the holes I'll have got enough of a sense of the big picture to know what goes into the holes. Hell, if I even recognize that I'm looking at a hole, I'll be in better shape than I think I am.

It's working so far. I got a glimpse of the rough shape of Melissa's crisis scene with the Ghost Prince. I think I might even be able to write it tomorrow. But I probably shouldn't, not until I've worked my way through the rough draft to that point. I am probably still missing necessary data. I can afford to put it off; I put in the first few sketchy brush strokes, so to speak, when I had that flash of "ah-ha!" and began typing into yWriter's notes field in the appropriate scene file. I can come back to it. I'll probably come back to it several times, filling in a brush stroke here and a brush stroke there until the whole avalanche comes down.

And now that I've thoroughly mixed my metaphors, I shall run off to the Sage Ocean before someone makes me clean up after myself. Whee!

Another revision on "Sidewalks" today. My office away from home was The Barking Dog Cafe in Lyons, because I started the day in Longmont and it seemed convenient to go west.

I should report that Highway 66 is all over construction. Ick.

Anyway... magic realism. Epiphanies. The one about the other. Let's see... It's not an easy genre to talk about. I'm not sure I can claim to write it, not being a Latin American author writing in the '60s. I'm not sure I can safely navigate the difference between "the magical" and "the fantastic". I'm not sure I can adequately rebut the accusation that it's just a fancy code phrase meaning "My fantasy writing is literary."

I'm going to keep using the phrase anyway. It seems the best way to label that which I aspire to write.

If you asked me a year ago to define the term, what it means to me, I'd have said, "Fantasy in which the fantastic element is presented as unremarkable, beside the point, or otherwise just a matter-of-fact part of daily life." Today I think that, as far as descriptions go, that works, but as a prescriptive it's not really enough. So here's what I'd say today--heck, here is what I am saying today.:

Magic realism is fantasy in which the fantastic element is not plot, but setting. When it really succeeds, the fantastic element serves to highlight the magical in the mundane. And the particular fantastic element should be of unique necessity to the story.

I'm not sure I've succeeded yet with "Sidewalks," but with each revision, the story has become more about the characters than the unexplained event; and the event has, I hope, stopped being just an SF/F stand-in for an earthquake or a 9/11. I'm starting to see parallels between the precise effects of that event and the dynamics of the main characters' relationship.

I mean, I think so, anyway. I could be wrong. And maybe I'm just overthinking things? Goodness knows the last thing a story needs is its author doing lit-crit analysis on it in public before it's even published. So... that's probably more than enough from me on this topic at this time. OKTHXBAI

As I mentioned a few entries ago, "Sidewalks" is in rewrites. Which is an awesome thing, because without someone else to push me, I might have left the story alone, never knowing how much better it could be.

And it is better. It started out as a story about a guy whining generically about love lost after having witnessed an extraordinary event. And, well, it still is about that, but the whining is very specific, the love was lost in a particular way, and the extraordinary event is necessary and not easily replaceable by some other extraordinary event.

There are a lot more details in the story. Not necessarily spelled out--that was how I ruined earlier drafts--but they're concrete in my head. They weren't, before. The rewrite request forced me to think about these things, to do a little worldbuilding, for all that the world is our own and the story's only 500 words long.

If you'd asked me last year to tell you how I knew whether a story should be in "short" or "flash" form, I'd have told you, "Short stories are told via a single scene, or a series of scenes. Flash-length stories are implicit in a single moment." I'd still say that today, I think, but putting it that way leaves something important out.

The difference between short stories and flash fiction is in the word-length required to tell them. But a story's word-length is not the same as its size. Short stories and flash fiction stories are exactly the same size as each other, and as novel-length stories, trilogy-length stories, novena-length stories: as big as the world. The characters must be equally real, their worlds equally huge. Word length is simply the frame through which the reader views the story.

Which means there is worldbuilding to be done and characters to be developed, no matter how short the story form is. Developing them fully is necessary before the author can choose which words, which images and thoughts and dialogue, belong inside the picture frame.

Anne Lamont, in Bird by Bird, talks about the one-inch picture frame that sits on her desk and reminds her not to try to tackle the entire task at once. "Just take it bird by bird," she recalls her father telling her overwhelmed brother on the occasion of an overdue homework assignment; similarly, she tells herself to just take her own writing inch by square inch. But that square inch of story remains part of an entire world big enough to live in, big enough to encompass untold thousands of stories.

I've been writing flash fiction for years, but only now do I understood that the flash fiction form is hard.

Hello from Chicago, a surprisingly bike-friendly city! And hello from Wrigleyville--as bike rides go, not as far from Union Station as I feared. Seriously, other than the last 5 blocks of my ride, which were residential so meh, there wasn't an inch of route that wasn't marked with bike lanes or with "Shared Lane / Yield to Bikes" signs. How did Google know? I told it "Union Station to Sheffield House Hotel," it showed me a route including the interstate, I told it "No, walking" because I am neither a car nor a bus, and it gave me this. You might note that the second appearance of Milwaukee Road involves going the wrong way on a one-way street; well, on that one-way street, there are bike lanes going in both directions. That's how good it is.

As for Sheffield House Hotel... Put it this way; it's no Hilton. But it's reasonably clean, tolerably functional, cheap, and in the target neighborhood.

And as for biking, go me. I checked my bike on the train for the first time. I feel like I spent the entire week before my trip getting ready for that: buying tools, practicing removing or rearranging pieces of my bike, getting surprised by the need for new tires or the suddenly broken seat adjustment nut, & etc. But it was time well spent. When I got to Denver Union Station, it took me under 15 minutes to have the basket off, handebars lowered and turned, pedals removed, and the bike into the $15 box. They even let me stow my tool bag in the box, which Amtrak's web page says absolutely is not to be done.

Picking the bike up in Chicago was slightly more cryptic; you sort of just have to know that bikes won't come up to the baggage carousel, but that you have to go down to the basement in the hard hat area to claim 'em and put 'em together. And given that you're not going to ride away carrying that box, at least not as is, maybe you're resigned to buying a new one each time you check; maybe you talk to someone working in baggage retrieval and they agree to hold onto it for you. Maybe you stomp it into a flat 3" x 2" square and hope it'll reconstitute. Be creative.

But all of this is by-the-by. What I really wanted to blog about was how Amtrak is totally my favorite mobile writing retreat like ever. Which you knew, if you know me. But this trip totally rocked for writing.

It didn't look like it at first. The train ride started out... crowded. I mean, even for Memorial Day weekend. Crowded. Which is good; more people riding the rails means more likelihood of service expansion. But it also meant that they had trouble seating us all. Seriously, the train was rolling for a good 5 minutes before a crew member found me a home for the night. But that's OK; I never doubted they would. Amtrak wasn't my problem. No, we reserve that honor for Gripey McBickerson, father traveling with small son, who wasn't gonna let some Amtrak crew member tell him to wait in line like the other customers. Noooo.

Really, this is classic. Indulge me for a bit. You know that destructive nonsense about "the customer is always right"? Ever notice how customers who really believe it, bless their pointed little shoes, seem to think that they, themselves, are always more right than the other customers? In Whiny McSidlesneeze's case, he and his son were oh so much more important than the other, oh, 20 families including small children also waiting to board. He must be seated right now! Screw waiting in line like everyone else, seat him and his kid first! Before all the paired seats are taken! Such that he and his son end up at opposite ends of the train! Because Amtrak crew members can't possibly be adept at gently shuffling passengers around to ensure children remain safely with their parents!

I'm not going to go into the whole saga of Kvetching McSullenpants and his four year old son. Not here. It's not the point. Besides, the poor kid is clearly going to be embarrassed enough by his father as the years roll by; I shouldn't add to it. No no no no. The point is, when one of the coach passengers is obnoxious, suddenly no matter where you're sitting, it seems like you're bumping into them. And Mr. Whingiewoe Carp-n-Moan continued to be obnoxious after this point. He seemed quite sure that the rest of us would find his constant barrage of cynical, sarcastic commentary entertaining. And retold the saga of how some crew member tried to bully him around to one and all. And practically encouraged his kid to repeat the crew member's name with him, that they may remember it forever, that he might someday soon, any minute now, sic five lawyers on him for, y'know, not treating him like the special snowflake shooting star that he so clearly was.

And so on, and so forth, and this is my writing environment? But but but I must finish my rewrite before Chicago!

And yet things were wonderful.

So eventually, after the train's gotten as far as Commerce City, us last two end-of-the-line single stragglers are led to seats two cars down. And we settle in. And I take me, myself, and my computer, along with recently critiqued copies of "The Impact of Snowflakes," into the Cafe Car... where I discover, to my delight, that it's the sort with two outlets at every cafe table and two more at ever cluster of sightseer-style chairs. This is not to be taken for granted! On the California Zephyr, one never knows what the outlet situation will be in coach or in the lounge. By Summer 2011, all Superliners should have outlets at every seat (offical word from Amtrak rep), but until then, I tend to squee a bit when I see outlets. So I happily ensconce myself and read through my friends' comments. Then I sort of just sit there, composting it all in my head, and playing with the Mardi Gras silk that Avedan gave me for my birthday (depicted here with Birdseye Maple "Lily Spindle" purchased at the new downtown Boulder shop Gypsy Wool). It spins up pretty.

So that was last night. This morning I woke up as we pulled into Omaha, about 6:20 AM or so (a bit behind schedule), and went into the wake-up routine: teeth brushing and coffee drinking and Morning Pages scribbling. And then a little more spinning. And then--"OK, no more procrastination! Must have this done by 3:00!"--sitting at another Cafe Car table to revise "Snowflakes" over the next... five hours, I think. Great leaping Gods and Goddess. Five freakin' hours.

(Mr. Sweetiepie and son showed up a lot, but they were Not Allowed to spoil the happy writerly buzz. Headphones are good. So is Determinedly Enjoying The View or Doggedly Staring Into The Computer Screen. Still, allowed myself a small amount of schadenfreude when overhearing dad admonishing tantruming son, "Hey now, no drama." Because goodness knows Kvetchy McMutterscoff never caused any drama.)

So as it turned out, I had not brought my Canon BJ-10sx with me in vain. I plugged in the printer upstairs in the lounge car and finished printing out that story about 45 minutes before arriving in Chicago. Then into the Priority International envelope it went, ready to be toted up to the nearest U.S. P.S. customer service lobby!

First thing I did in Chicago, other than retrieve and reconstitute my bike, was stick that story in the mail Priority International. Because I have a March 31 deadline I'd like to beat, thanks! I'll let you know how it goes.

So it's later and I'm hanging around the Sheffield House Hotel lobby, posting this. And on the one hand, I'm feeling like, way to go me! Today, I Was A Writer! Good job! You have Accomplished and now you may go play. Which I did. I biked over to Blue Bayou and said hi to my brother--who was not, in my opinion, nearly surprised enough to see me riding my bike in Chicago. He just said, "Hey, you're a little late, aren't you?" Meh. I'll do the crawfish thing tomorrow. Today I was just saying hi. And then I went over to North Clark to a Japanese restaurant I'd noticed on my way up from the station: All You Can Eat Sushi. That appears to be the actual name of the place. I ate there. Now, I hurt.

But on the other hand - and this is weird, I think - I'm feeling both addicted to stress and addicted to the happy. The stress is, "Oh my Gods I have to get this stuff DONE today," and the gut level of it isn't necessarily affected by having actually got the stuff done. I have to keep reminding myself that I did my assignment, really, I can relax now!

And then there's the happy. I like Feeling Like A Writer! I should do it again! I should spend another four hours revising something so I can pop it in the mail so I can get that feeling again!

Seeing as how it's eleven o'clock at night, I've been up since six, and I didn't sleep very soundly last night, those 'nother four hours are at the very least not going to happen right now. But watch this space for developments; a much shorter version of it may happen tomorrow or Monday.

P.S. I'm on Twitter now, Gods help me. Click the link if hearing me jabber interests you; I'm doing a good bit of it since I'm traveling. Meanwhile, my uber-rss should start feeding to Twitter via TwitterFeed. Let's see what happens when I post this...

OK. SRSLY. Here's the plan.

Tomorrow (er, later today) is Saturday. It's also the day I have a Cessna 172 reserved for a flight out of Boulder. Me and a friend, our plan is to get in that plane around 8:15 AM and go up to Cheyenne, kinda like I did two weeks ago, and have a productive writing date at the airport diner there. Then we'll fly back in time to arrive around 12:30 PM.

I'm not exactly certain that the flying part of that is going to happen. A cold front is moving in tonight, and that may mean high winds. Cheyenne area is forecasting 15 knot winds around when we'd be taking off to go home. Before it starting saying "NIL," Rocky Mountain Metro was talking about 15 gusting to 24 knots. Also? Winds from the west. Landing on Runway 26 in Boulder. In high winds and gusty conditions! I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with that. I'm not even certain I should aspire to be comfortable with that.

I'll have to reevaluate in the morning, when the new TAFS show up. (That's "Terminal Aerodrome Forecast." Yer welcome.)

However, the writing date part of the plan will go off as planned. It may not be in Cheyenne. It may be in Highland Square. It may be right here in Boulder. But we're gonna go plonk ourselves and our laptops somewhere wired-n-caffeinated, and we're gonna write.

Gonna write a bit now, actually. Just noodle around for about 5 minutes, see what I think up before I drift off to sleep.

No, you won't get to see that either. But it'll happen!

Oh look! Another last-minute contest entry. It worked so well last time, I figured it would be a shame if I didn't try it again.

The contest: Write a bit of Yohoho Puzzle Pirates fan fiction. Specifically, give the Antediluvian Conch an origin story. As far as I can tell, the Antediluvian Conch is a whisk token. If you have it, you can transport yourself to Atlantis. Whee! I love game expansions! (complete contest rules)

You can read my entry here. It is much less purple than my previous last-minute fiction contest entry. But it's just as last-minute. Deadline's in about 14 minutes, I think.

Anyway, thought y'all might like to know that my sprained fiction tendon appears to be healing up nicely. (Also, I think I began a new novel the other day. It's cyberpunk. Ish. But that's another story.)

World Horror Convention 2007 is over now, bar the drinking. And there's still a good deal of drinking going on, if the population of the hotel lounge is any indication. By all accounts, it's been a good WHC.

"Captain Hook" finally got some peer review here. I hadn't planned on it, actually, but when I arrived Saturday at the Twilight Tales Open Mic critique session, intending to be part of the audience, I was immediately accosted with, "So are you gonna sign up?" with a clear subtext of do, please! And I thought, well, I do have something appropriate...

Boy, howdy, was that a good thing. I mean, right up front, it was educational, that crawling in my stomach as I realized I was reading aloud three whole pages of exposition to an audience more patient than the story deserved. But had I read it aloud alone, I probably would have just come away with "Yes, that's a heavily front-loaded story. I need to cut that." What I got from this critique session was much more concrete: which three sentence clauses of the exposition were actually needed, where to put them, and then how to collapse this scene with that character dynamic to improve the whole immensely. Eric Cherry deserves a round of kudos for being such a swell critic. He MC'd the events and acted as critique facilitator, leading off the discussion with his exceedingly insightful comments.

I was relieved to hear that the ending worked. Reactions ranged from "I didn't see that coming" to "I saw it coming and I hoped it wouldn't happen." This is a very good thing. It's always a good thing when the critiques reaffirm your own assessment of which bits succeed and which bits need work. It's also good when you can make an audience of veteran horror readers flinch.

Later that night I read for the Twilight Tales Flash Fiction Contest. I didn't place this year, but I didn't expect to. The story I read had only been written over the past couple of days, after all. Simply that I produced new fiction in time to perform it Saturday night made me feel proud of myself.

Today and Friday (once I arrived) were more relaxed. Attended a panel here and there (in addition to his other stellar qualities, Mort Castle is a brilliant panel moderator), stuck my head in at a few parties, ate out a little, saw a very small corner of Toronto with my very own eyes. Did a little knitting show-n-tell with fellow stitchers (including the designer of the dread Knithulhu!). Today, a local couple (the Knithulhu designer and her husband) led me via street car and subway to an excellent Irish pub at King and Brant Streets. I wish I could have seen more of this city, but I don't wish it enough to exchange my Amtrak tickets for a later date and check into a hostel. I'm ready to go home. I feel like I've been traveling non-stop, even though I've been in the same place since Friday night. I'm missing my husband and our cats and our home and the coffee house down the street. I guess there's a limit to how long I can drift before I get antsy.

Getting on the Maple Leaf tomorrow morning at 8:30. Should be in Denver by the same hour on Wednesday. Might check in on Tuesday morning from Chicago. If not, I'll say hi when I get home.

Hello! I'm in Chicago. I didn't expect to be here at 4:30 PM on Thursday the 29th--I quite expected to be on Amtrak's Maple Leaf line headed for the Canadian border--but them's the freight. I mean, the breaks.

It occurred to me that although I've been blogging up a storm at Metroblogging and Burnzpost, I haven't said much over here in a while. Um. There are reasons. I won't say what they are, because I don't want to disturb any assumptions you might have about them being good reasons. Just you go on thinking that, eh?

Anyway, my pirate story won't be in Shimmer's pirate issue. The rejection letter was complimentary. I don't know whether JJA uses form email letters like he does snail-mail ones. If so, this was the "nice writing but didn't ultimately work for me" one. Which isn't a bad thing.

So "A Wish For Captain Hook" will get in the rewrite queue, right behind all the other short stories waiting to be rewritten. I'm-a gonna be working on that whilst riding the rails. A sort of mobile writing retreat, see. No internet means no Puzzle Pirates to distract me! Yarr! Unfortunately, I can't bring myself to uninstall Spider Solitaire, and it's amazing how addictive that gets when there's other things I should be doing.

How many people bring a printer onboard an Amtrak superliner and set up a mobile office in coach? I mean, really? Can't be that many. People stared a bit.

When next I update, it'll be from the World Horror Convention in Toronto. At which I shall be arriving a day later than planned. Darn it. But for the record, Amtrak treats its "distressed passengers" very well. The hotel was quite posh.

If you happen to live at 4335 Lake Villa Drive in Metairie, Louisiana, I promise this isn't personal. The fictional kids in my fictional story just happen to live on your nonfictional block, that's all. I just popped addresses into Google Maps until I got sort of the house I was envisioning, et voila.

I didn't want to set the story on the street where I grew up. That seemed too easy. Plus I've done it before. So I hit on using the piece of Lake Pontchartrain I'm next most familiar with: the area by the Suburban Canal. I rode my bike down there countless times as a teenager, sometimes hanging out under the gazebo with my writing notebook and my headphones, sometimes just tossing french fries to the seagulls. I guess I could have had my two fictional kids hanging out on the sea wall by the Bonnabel Boat Launch, but it's too late now. I've worked on the story long enough that, dammit, they live where they live, and trying to pretend otherwise would be dishonest.

Sometimes pieces of a story get ossified like that; they're no longer up for debate because that's the way it happened. What began as fiction sort of calcifies into, if not exactly reality, than an idea that my thought processes treat as reality. Katrina happened in '05, the New Orleans Saints won their Divisional Championship in '06, and Louise and Jimbo live on the first block of Lake Villa south of West Esplanade. I know one of those things isn't true, but my thoughts make room for it just as though it were no less factual than the other two.

Anyway... If you happen to live in the area, dear reader, I wouldn't mind knowing how your neighborhood fared. The story is set during November/December '05, and I want to be at least semi-faithful to what really happened. Was it like my parents' block, where all the damage came from holes in roofs, not flood? Was the street pretty empty during the months following, or did people come home fairly quickly? I didn't see too much full-body devastation last time I took a bike ride up Lake Villa from the pumping station to Veterans Memorial Boulevard, but then that was December '06 and all sorts of restoration could have happened since. And when did all that construction at the pumping station start? It's not the safe-house I'm talking about; that's done. It's all the cranes digging up huge chunks of levee that I mean. And when was that sea wall built in front of the mouth of the canal? I know it wasn't there when I was in high school some 15 years ago. How do you even begin Googling for that kind of information? Think the Jefferson Parish Library can help? They can certainly tell me about branch closures and reopenings after the storm, at least. Maybe I should check the NOLA.com message boards, or ask around the comment sections at Metroblogging New Orleans.

If you have info and feel like sharing, the email link is at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Yes, it's a pop-up web form. I'm sorry. Deal with it.