Seriously, you have no idea how easy it is to be a best selling author. When you see a book on the best seller list of Amazon, don’t you assume that it must be selling hundreds of thousands? Try 800. Not 800,000, just 800. That’s what both the authors on this Happy Hour tell us.

Dr Chris Yandle gets up around 6AM. By around 7AM he’s jotting down a clever line that he’s dreamed up since 6AM. He puts the clever line on a piece of paper and slips it into his daughter’s book bag. (This is not the plot of a novel, btw, this is what actually happens in the Yandle household in Mandeville.) So, anyway, after Dr Chris has a bunch of these notes he writes them up into a book called Lucky Enough, which turns out to be a prophetic title ‘cause he’s lucky enough to sell out of the whole run and be a big deal in the non-fiction world and seriously that’s only about 600 books later.

You’d be forgiven for not believing these numbers could possibly be true, but then Fermin Ceballos confirms them. Fermin is also the author of a book called Pisadno Mi Sombra, which you have probably already gathered is in Spanish, and there’s some English in there too. Fermin is also shocked at his successful book sales of around 800 books – and both of our authors are working on their second books!

Fermin also happens to be a talented musician, which is his primary job. There’s a parallel world of Latin music in New Orleans and the South in general in which Fermin is a star, and deservedly so. You can also catch him online on the Band Together benefit concert to raise money for Covidly-unemployed musicians.

Connie Bellone is not an author or a musician but she does live on the Northshore, in delightful Madisonville. However, most of her work is done on the Southshore, brightening the lives of under-privileged children with her Health & Education Alliance of Louisiana, aka HEAL. Just as an aside, she is not killing wild turkeys over there in Madisonville, though there is apparently no good reason not to.

Andrew Duhon and Fermin Ceballos team up as best one can on Zoom on a beautiful Andrew Duhon tune, Promised Land.

Photos by Jill Lafleur.