What Is My Obsession with New Orleans, You Ask?

Readers and site visitors often ask me why or how a Wyoming girl ended up writing about New Orleans. To answer that question, we have to time travel again. Oops.

So, in 1980, we moved to New Orleans. That is the short answer. 

New Orleans is an amazing and almost magical place. We lived there for 18 years and I wrote my first book there and a lot of subsequent books. (To figure out how many would require math and we know I don’t like math. Haha)

As I mentioned last week, The Spy Who Kissed Me was my first finished book and it also garnered me my first agent. Obviously, it failed to sell to a major publisher (yay! Turned out to be huge blessing for me, though I was bummed at the time). But my then-agent (not to be confused with my later then-agent who told me to focus), told me that series sold better. Could I either make Spy into a series or write something new. 

I was only starting to learn how my writing brain worked, but somehow I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to make Spy into a series. I did know that New Orleans books were popular and I thought, “Wow, I should start a New Orleans series.” 

I was way overconfident for someone who had written ONE book, but in this business, being overconfident is about the only way to keep at it. <Insert wry grin here>

So I had a city, and somehow or other, I found a story. I became WAY less confident and before I finished it, I lost my agent. I may have wandered in strange lands with some other books and dabbled in scriptwriting before I finished the book I’d meant to call I Love Luci – When I Don’t Want to Kill Her —until Desilu dropped the trademark hammer on me. And that is how Do Wah Diddy Die got its name.

It never did become a series, though I did write two short story sequels that were bundled into something called Do Wah Diddy Delete. 

So it is kind of my second book, but was not the second book I released. That is a story for another day. 

But Do Wah Diddy Die was my first New Orleans story. It was also my first screenplay and was even, briefly, optioned and came within a whisker of being filmed. As I said, this business requires a LOT of confidence to keep going. Lol

So, now that I’ve answered that question, do you have any others?

Perilously yours,

Pauline