I realize that the town and people in Midnight's Song likely bears no resemblance whatsoever to the real New Orleans. For the most part, I'm fine with that. The story wasn't originally set in New Orleans, and I don't want to completely re-write the characters to make them fit a culture I know nothing about and can't do justice to.

On the other hand, since I'm using the name, I feel there should be at least a passing nod to the real, extremely interesting culture of the place.

Sadly, my knowledge of New Orleans consists of a meal at a Bon Temps restaurant some years ago and a cartoon alligator from my childhood that used to say "I gah-ron-tee" a lot. That and the news footage of Katrina.

Needless to say, none of those experiences really tells me anything about New Orleans--I don't even have a clear picture of the stereotypes, let alone the actual people.

That's why I'm making this thread. I'm sure the people of New Orleans have better things to do (especially right now) than helping an author portray their city a little more accurately--but since I've already jumped into this any help would be greatly appreciated. Especially this:

What the heck does a Louisiana Creole accent sound like?

Seriously, I've been trying to look this up and it's driving me crazy. You'd think there's be some kind of database on accents out there--it'd be an incredibly useful tool for authors.

Any information on how to make a character's dialouge sound more accurate to the region would be a huge help for me. The last thing I want to do is pull a George Lucas and give my characters insultingly bad stereotypical accents, but at this point I don't know enough to even do that.

Well, in the interests of not looking like a total jackass, I've been researching New Orleans and it's culture to try and make this story more accurate.

I don't know how well it's working, since I mention an intersection in Chapter 8 that doesn't exist (I looked at the map wrong) and I just learned that that the New Orleans accent is "Yat", and not Louisiana Creole. I still have no idea what it sounds like.

At any rate, I haven't gotten any complaints yet--though this cold I've had for the past four weeks almost makes me suspect I've been cursed by some unhappy locals. XP