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I have never felt luckier than the day I set foot in New Orleans. Lucky, because I fell in love with a city before I ever fell in love with a person, and because of that, I know what true love means to me: always coming home to new adventures. (Also lucky, because I got to hold this cool alligator.)
My name is Regan Baudelaire, and I am an author and blogger, (if you were looking for the link from the rewards list, that's it right there!), Halloween enthusiast, and macaroni-eating nerd. I'm twenty-three now, and since the age of thirteen, I have been writing a Middle Grade fantasy series set in New Orleans. Somehow, between writing the first (terrible) lines in a fuzzy diary, scribbling ideas for alternate mythologies and character development on coffee shop napkins, and performing some very odd google searches in the name of book research, I have managed to raise this book out of the glittery depths of pre-teen prose and into something that, to my bewilderment and astounded gratitude, has interested agents and editors. It has been the most difficult journey of my life. Not because writing is a chore, but because somewhere along the way when writing fantasy for children, you come to realize that every demon, every monster you create, is one that already lives under your own bed.
I have grown up writing this story over the past ten years, fine-tuning every detail, and learning the hard way that, as much as we like to tell ourselves this, we do not always have this kind of editing power over our own stories. Sometimes, something or someone else writes a chapter for us, and we are left to fill in the devastating plot holes they leave in their wake. For the past three years, I have been fighting scattered diagnoses: major depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and post traumatic stress disorder. After all of this, New Orleans was the first sense of home and peace I had experienced in years. For me it was, and is, that place Maurice Sendak described, that place where only the things you want to happen, happen. When I was forced to leave New Orleans for health reasons, this book, set in my magical city, kept me alive when I thought I couldn’t take another step. Every move I make now is back towards those wildly strange streets, bursting with gnarled tree roots and the ever-present rumble of olive and cherry streetcars.
Someone recently sent me a message asking a very simple question. It was something that could really be answered in tourist pamphlet format, one of those shiny papers they stack side by side in chlorine-scented hotel lobbies. “What are the things you like so much about New Orleans?” I stared at it for a minute. Beignets? Mardi Gras? I remembered a quote from a 1920s guidebook to the French Quarter that I hastily scribbled on a note book page after coming across it. “We wander through old streets, and pause before the age stricken houses; and, strange to say, the magic past lights them up.” And that was it: to me: Magic. It takes no stretch of the imagination to write a fantasy series set in New Orleans, because the magic is inescapable, in everywhere you look, in everyone you meet.
The first week that I lived in New Orleans some years ago, I was almost entirely broke, counting nickels and dimes on the green laminate counter of a tiny, family-owned grocery store. The owner, a man of about sixty, asked me over the thrum of the singular fan if I was new here, and if I could pay for everything I needed. Embarrassed, I told him that I was new, and of course I was planning to pay for it all, I just needed a moment to count my money. He stopped me from counting and told me that I had misunderstood him. He wasn’t asking if I could pay, he was asking if I had enough money for everything I needed. He disappeared to the back of the store and emerged with several weeks worth of dry goods and even a container of hot homemade crab soup, and he insisted I take it because “Nobody goes hungry in my city.”
His city, now my city as well, is another world, where strangers talk to you on the streets because you spark their curiosity, where peeling purple fairytale houses are smothered by palm trees and beads from last year’s Mardi Gras. There's always a little bit of powdered sugar speckling the streets outside Cafe Du Monde. Jazz musicians play dented golden tubas in the streets, speaking of clear southern sunlight or the heavy, purple humidity that seeps through the mossy oaks and makes the evening cicadas sing. There is magic here that does not sleep, and there is no limit to the gratitude I feel for every single dollar, even encouraging words, that bring me closer to home. My goal is singular: to save up enough money to pay first and last month’s rent to secure an apartment, and for that I truly wish I could say I didn’t need any help. Even the tiniest bit will get me one step closer, not only to home, but to finishing the story I set out to write ten years ago, exactly where it was meant to be finished. Once I am home, the rest is up to me, as it should be.
Thank you for taking the time to read and look at some of my favorite photos that I took on my adventures in New Orleans, I hope every single one of you comes to visit one day!
Sincerely and with a big jug of iced sweet tea,
Regan
My name is Regan Baudelaire, and I am an author and blogger, (if you were looking for the link from the rewards list, that's it right there!), Halloween enthusiast, and macaroni-eating nerd. I'm twenty-three now, and since the age of thirteen, I have been writing a Middle Grade fantasy series set in New Orleans. Somehow, between writing the first (terrible) lines in a fuzzy diary, scribbling ideas for alternate mythologies and character development on coffee shop napkins, and performing some very odd google searches in the name of book research, I have managed to raise this book out of the glittery depths of pre-teen prose and into something that, to my bewilderment and astounded gratitude, has interested agents and editors. It has been the most difficult journey of my life. Not because writing is a chore, but because somewhere along the way when writing fantasy for children, you come to realize that every demon, every monster you create, is one that already lives under your own bed.
I have grown up writing this story over the past ten years, fine-tuning every detail, and learning the hard way that, as much as we like to tell ourselves this, we do not always have this kind of editing power over our own stories. Sometimes, something or someone else writes a chapter for us, and we are left to fill in the devastating plot holes they leave in their wake. For the past three years, I have been fighting scattered diagnoses: major depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and post traumatic stress disorder. After all of this, New Orleans was the first sense of home and peace I had experienced in years. For me it was, and is, that place Maurice Sendak described, that place where only the things you want to happen, happen. When I was forced to leave New Orleans for health reasons, this book, set in my magical city, kept me alive when I thought I couldn’t take another step. Every move I make now is back towards those wildly strange streets, bursting with gnarled tree roots and the ever-present rumble of olive and cherry streetcars.
Someone recently sent me a message asking a very simple question. It was something that could really be answered in tourist pamphlet format, one of those shiny papers they stack side by side in chlorine-scented hotel lobbies. “What are the things you like so much about New Orleans?” I stared at it for a minute. Beignets? Mardi Gras? I remembered a quote from a 1920s guidebook to the French Quarter that I hastily scribbled on a note book page after coming across it. “We wander through old streets, and pause before the age stricken houses; and, strange to say, the magic past lights them up.” And that was it: to me: Magic. It takes no stretch of the imagination to write a fantasy series set in New Orleans, because the magic is inescapable, in everywhere you look, in everyone you meet.
The first week that I lived in New Orleans some years ago, I was almost entirely broke, counting nickels and dimes on the green laminate counter of a tiny, family-owned grocery store. The owner, a man of about sixty, asked me over the thrum of the singular fan if I was new here, and if I could pay for everything I needed. Embarrassed, I told him that I was new, and of course I was planning to pay for it all, I just needed a moment to count my money. He stopped me from counting and told me that I had misunderstood him. He wasn’t asking if I could pay, he was asking if I had enough money for everything I needed. He disappeared to the back of the store and emerged with several weeks worth of dry goods and even a container of hot homemade crab soup, and he insisted I take it because “Nobody goes hungry in my city.”
His city, now my city as well, is another world, where strangers talk to you on the streets because you spark their curiosity, where peeling purple fairytale houses are smothered by palm trees and beads from last year’s Mardi Gras. There's always a little bit of powdered sugar speckling the streets outside Cafe Du Monde. Jazz musicians play dented golden tubas in the streets, speaking of clear southern sunlight or the heavy, purple humidity that seeps through the mossy oaks and makes the evening cicadas sing. There is magic here that does not sleep, and there is no limit to the gratitude I feel for every single dollar, even encouraging words, that bring me closer to home. My goal is singular: to save up enough money to pay first and last month’s rent to secure an apartment, and for that I truly wish I could say I didn’t need any help. Even the tiniest bit will get me one step closer, not only to home, but to finishing the story I set out to write ten years ago, exactly where it was meant to be finished. Once I am home, the rest is up to me, as it should be.
Thank you for taking the time to read and look at some of my favorite photos that I took on my adventures in New Orleans, I hope every single one of you comes to visit one day!
Sincerely and with a big jug of iced sweet tea,
Regan
Organizer
Regan Baudelaire
Organizer
Oneonta, NY