It’s a distinct possibility that our offerings at the site tomorrow might be a little on the thin side. I think most of our readers will have a decent idea why.

I don’t expect that Francine will be an Ida or a Katrina or anything like that. But a hurricane is a hurricane, and it’s pretty likely that it’ll knock out power and internet to Hayride Central Headquarters, at least for a while. Where I am we have oodles of very fine oak trees located in close proximity to power lines, and when storms come it’s practically a constant that the very fine oak tree branches will inevitably sweep those power lines and take down the grid.

As we’re expecting Francine through here in the late afternoon hours, that’ll all but certainly put us without power. We’ll see how fast Entergy gets us back going. So Jeff LeJeune will have the conn tomorrow, I’m expecting, and we’ll see what he’s got to offer while I’m out in the yard cleaning up tree trash and unclogging storm drains on the street.

Maybe by Friday I’ll be back to normal. We’ll see.

Either way, I wanted to take this opportunity to announce something I haven’t talked about here at The Hayride, which is that there’s a new novel! This one is called From Hellmarsh With Love, and it’s currently serializing at The American Spectator. The first episode, which contains the prologue and the first two chapters, went up over the weekend. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 will go up this Saturday.

Here’s a clip of me talking about the book on the Richard Syrett Show in Toronto yesterday afternoon briefly before we started talking about last night’s debate…

From Hellmarsh With Love is the sequel to King of the Jungle, and it’s the continuation of the Mike and PJ love story. The new novel is actually told not from Mike’s perspective but instead from PJ’s, which is a bit of a challenge for me as a writer. Would you believe I could write a first-person story from a female perspective? Well, I’m doing it! Haven’t gotten any complaints yet from the readers of the first serialized installment or the people beta-reading the further chapters.

The book is set in London, where Mike and PJ are on their honeymoon. But Great Britain is in chaos over the radicalism of its new government (there are a few things in the book that I’ve thrown in as exaggerations, but the vast majority of the craziness is real policy that Keir Starmer’s Labour government is touting) and the unassimilated barbarianism of its immigrants and the working class’ frustrations with it. As a podcaster and journalist, Mike is dragged into making this a working honeymoon and he begins interviewing prominent folks to get to the bottom of the tempest, and that turns dangerous, and…

I’ll stop myself there.

If you’re interested in preordering a signed copy, which will be shipped to you on or around November 5, we can help with that…

When I’m back up and running I’m going to do something about the Baton Rouge mayor’s race, which is really the biggest story of this election cycle in Louisiana. There’s a poll which came out a week or so ago and it had Sharon Weston Broome at 29 percent, which is an ugly, ugly number for an incumbent, and Sid Edwards and Ted James tied at 23.

The majority of the undecideds in that poll are Republican voters, which means James, for all the money he’s managed to hornswoggle out of Republican business interests, has got some real trouble on his hands. Those votes are almost certainly going to break for Edwards unless something weird happens, and if they do he’s going to be in the runoff. Then James will have a bit of a quandary on his hands: is everything he’s said about how terrible Broome is a lie? If so, he’ll never be able to raise money from white Republicans again for whatever office he’ll next run for. If not, then he’ll have no choice to back Edwards in the runoff.

Anyway, if the power isn’t out by the time I can get around to it tonight or tomorrow morning, I’ll have that; otherwise I’ll have it on Friday.

And finally, you’ll start to see some buzz here at the site about an event still in the concept stage, which is that we might be bringing The American Spectator down to New Orleans for a post-election summit on the future of America. Exactly how that looks I don’t know yet, but we’re pretty stoked about the conversations we’ve had so far. It’s probably too early to even talk about this, but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway. It’s exciting stuff. I’ll have more about it as we go.