New Orleans:
Readers of Thunderstruck know that the story has been taking us to New Orleans, so I feel I need to acknowledge what is going on there right now with hurricane Katrina. This is a pretty heartwrenching thing to see. At this writing, it's not clear how bad it's going to get, but there's already been a terrible amount of loss of life and destruction.

I first visited New Orleans in 1988. The month or so I spent there made an immense impression on me for several reasons, not the least of which was the food. Cooking in New Orleans has reached the status of a spiritual art, transcending normal "good food" and rising into some divine realm of pure bliss. Plus the music, the dancing, the history... incredible. Of course, since I went there in August, the heat was also rather astonishing.

Most of all, though, I came away with the impression that if I had ever been to a "magical" place, it was New Orleans. I don't mean that in the sense of a kind of happy Disney magic. The idea here is that it felt like the rules were somehow just a bit looser down in the bayou country. The everyday, solid world that you could count on so regularly in other places wasn't quite as dependable in New Orleans. Strange things could just happen, and not all of them were safe.

It was just a feeling. A very evocative one.

So this is the reason why Thunderstruck centers so strongly on New Orleans. That's the sort of place Sharon and Gail are heading for their adventures.

As far as Katrina and the aftermath... I'm still not sure if I'm going to use it in the story. I never set a specific time frame for when the story of Thunderstruck is happening, but now it seems that it occurs sometime before the summer of 2005. It's a very small thing, in the grand scale -- but I have this story to tell, and now there's an immense, gut-wrenching twist that I did not anticipate.

All my hopes go out to the people of New Orleans.

- Grayson Towler
August, 2005