Bonne Année! It's a little late, but bonne année anyway. I was talking with someone the other day about the idea of someone writing a historical novel of the Evangeline Parish area. I can't do it, but I'm sure someone out there could. Someone could write a massive Lonesome Dove type epic on the French people in the south and their relations with the English people in the northern part of the parish. It would start with the Native Americans, then the arrival of the Europeans and Africans, and maybe the Civil War would end it. Create several key characters to focus on and then throw them into all sorts of drama to make interesting reading.
But better than a Tolstoy type novel would be a Dostoyevskian novel focusing on a couple of characters embroiled in all kinds of tracas. For example, a bitter French Créole Fontenot man, a few years in Louisiana from soldiering in Alabama and now raising cattle, falls in love with a borderline psychotic Acadian Jeansonne woman ... and some sort of drama happens - someone is killed, there is an investigation, etc, etc. The novel would have a tense, tight plot, but also illustrate the area's history and culture, making it some sort of historical pulp fiction. The history of the area would be accurate, characters fleshed out, and have drama you see every damn day even in 2008, but magnified centering on a crime. That would grab people's attention, educate, and people would tour Evangeline Parish because they read the book and want to visit the area. Throw in Madame Grand Doigt as a supernatural character, and just for kicks, have her character changed to a demonic nutcase scaring the crap out of kids, instead of the sweet old lady she is now on New Year's Day.