What I’m Working On:

Currently, I’m working on my first novel, a fictional story about the very real events of Hurricane Katrina (set in New Orleans, of course) and the situations surrounding the catastrophic storm. Political intrigue, murder, death, and unconditional love plague the citizens of New Orleans after the worst natural disaster in the city’s history.

This is taking exhaustive research in order to get all of my facts correct involving the anatomy of the storm, meteorology, the events in the Superdome, the flood, and the setting itself. The storyline is completely fictional.

Progress:

So far, I have a basic storyline mapped out and my characters locked down. I have names for all of them and skeleton storylines down for each character.

Next Steps:

Next, I need to create profiles for each character and really think about what these people are like, their habits, their tendencies, their thoughts, etc. to really make them come to life. I’m a firm believer that characters should drive a story, not the other way around, so I want to really have my characters figured out so that they can dictate what will happen next in the story.

Other works in progress:

I am working on two short stories. One is based on a story my grandfather requested that I write called “The Old Pro,” which is a baseball story about a little league coach who used to be a professional baseball player. The other is called “Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night,” and it is my grandparents’ love story.

I hope to continue to post to this blog at least once per week, and hopefully twice. I plan to discuss any issue that catches my eye at the time, from thoughts on things I am reading (books, articles, magazines, and anything else), to politics, to my progress in writing, to health. Hopefully, I will get into the habit of consistently writing and writing each and every day.