Let Your Freak Flag Fly

Hubby and I have just returned from a great weekend in New Orleans.  With our crazy schedules and three crazy kids, we have not gotten away together in years.  Really, it's been years (plural).  

We had a great trip which started with a complimentary upgrade to our room.  Yes, we had a gargantuan suite in which to run around  all weekend with champagne at night and fuzzy robes.   Ahhh. 

We also had many, many great meals.  This picture is from the Napolean House where we had muffalettas.  

Notice the beer bottles and tobasco sauce on the table.

We also met up with my roommate from college, one of my dearest friends who is now a professor at Tulane.  She said, "I often think of something you said to me when I was coming to Mississippi for your wedding." I took a deep swig of my Bloody Mary and said, "Yikes, what did I say???" 

Well, here's my brilliant twenty-five-year old advice to my friend who had  confessed to me that she was a little worried about coming to Mississippi and fitting in with my hometown friends--my Mississippi friends are more In Style magazine and Blahniks and she is more Faulkner and Birkenstocks.  I said, "Don't worry about fitting in because you won't fit in.  So don't even try. Just be yourself and they'll appreciate you for being smart and quirky and different."

While I could have said it a little less abrasively, those are good words to live by (I need to remember to impart this wisdom to my teenage girls someday).  This is also good advice to keep in mind when I'm writing.  I acknowledge that the market is important and that we should all be looking toward the hot sellers as we try to become published--but if you write something to "fit in" then you'll never get anywhere.  And, you'll look like a poser.  So figure out who you are and what your voice is and what your very own quirky story is and roll with it.

Let your freak flag fly and LAISSEZ LES BON TEMPS ROULEZ!