So the Saints lost and the city of New Orleans' football joyride is over.

Next up: Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday is on Feb. 20 this year, and the Mardi Gras season is in full swing, with a couple of parades already finished and the colorful Krewe du Vieux scheduled to ramble through the French Quarter a week from Saturday.

Last year during Mardi Gras season, we launched our second title, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, at the Saturn Bar in what was personally one of the most memorable moments of my career.

This Wednesday night, four of the contributors to the anthology will be reading from their work at the Jefferson Parish library at 7pm. It's free and open to the public. Writers will be running the gamut of the New Orleans experience, from Dave Rutledge's "Corners of the Quarter" to Sarah Inman's "A Lesson from Below" to CW Cannon's "New Orleans Manifesto," which was handed out by costumed revelers at Mardi Gras 2003 and is even more relevant today, and finally, to Ray Shea's hilarious "I Was a Teenage Float Grunt."

This is something I won't be mentioning on our Voices of New Orleans blog, but since you folks are ostensibly reading this blog because you're interested in the travails of a small publisher, we are getting excitingly close to deciding whether to produce a second edition of Do You Know. We printed a little fewer than 6,000 copies of DYK and have just several hundred left in our warehouse in Seattle. If we don't get hit with massive returns in the next month or so and if sales stay on pace, look for a thicker version of DYK as early as later this year (which means, of course, the first editions will become more valuable — so if you don't have one yet, get your butt to the Jefferson Parish library or order one here!)