Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 27

Never Enough 2018

Every year I recap the writing triumphs and disappointments of the previous twelve months. Every year I feel like I haven’t done enough. This year in particular, with my kid’s still-undiagnosed constant headache, I spent way too much time calling doctors, driving to medical appointments, and sitting in hospitals. I wish I’d had the energy to hustle more. Hopefully next year will be better.

Book publications:

[image error]Nothing major came out this year.

I did put out a collection of cemetery essays called Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir on Wattpad in July and August. It gathers essays I had published on Gothic.Net and GothicBeauty.com, along with the introduction to the original edition of Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries.

I have a proposal out for The Pioneer Cemeteries of the San Francisco Bay Area and another for a project with Lisa Morton that I’m excited about.  Hopefully those books will find homes in 2019.

Short fiction publications:

“Elle a Vu un Loup,” the short story I’m most excited about this year, was published in Weirdbook #40. My recurring character Alondra DeCourval traps a predator in a graveyard on an island in Northern Michigan.

“Letter from New Orleans” is about the first day Alondra spent in the Crescent City, when she wanders into a ghost story. It introduces characters who appear in “Last-Born,” the most anthologized Alondra story (most recently republished in Alondra’s Investigations). “Letter from New Orleans” was published in the Ladies of Horror Flash Project.

“Mr. Moonlight,” a very short story from Alondra’s childhood, is also available at the Ladies of Horror Flash Project. I’m really proud of how this one turned out.

I put together a chapbook of “The Fatal Book” to give away at WorldCon.  It served its purpose, in that it got me to talk to people so I could hand them a copy of the booklet.

I made 3 ebook collections of previously published Alondra stories:

[image error]Alondra’s Experiments was published on Valentine’s Day. Alondra explores alchemy, vampirism, and just how far she will go for love.

Alondra’s Investigations was published at the end of April. Alondra faces elemental magic, a ghost story, and a book that can cause the end of the world.

Alondra’s Adventures appeared in June. Alondra befriends a nature spirit in the heart of Tokyo, solves an ancient vendetta in Venice, and stumbles into a Japanese ghost story.

Short fiction sales:

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“Something in the Water,” an Alondra story set in San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences-in-exile, will appear in the next issue of Occult Detective Quarterly. My name made it onto the cover! (This issue may be out before the end of 2018. They are very close to having it published.)

Other than that, I collected 12 rejection slips for a handful of stories. Maybe next year my hit ratio will be better.

Short Nonfiction Publications:

“10 American Cemeteries to See Before You Die” appeared on The Daily Beast on April 7, 2018. This is my collection of cemeteries to see in springtime.

I wrote 9 columns for the Horror Writers Association’s newsletter about the histories of burial and cremation, cemetery ghost stories, and gravestone iconography.

I interviewed 44 authors on this blog, including my idols Gemma Files, Nancy Kilpatrick, Yvonne Navarro, and a whole lot more. You can search on “5 Questions” to find all the interviews.

On CemeteryTravel.com, I was proud to put together a two-part series on the “Resting Places of Horror Icons.” Here’s part one.

Guest Post Publications:

Despite good intentions, I didn’t get many guest posts written this year.

“Four Graves for Harvey Milk” appeared on The Cemetery Club on February 1 to kick off Great Britain’s Gay Pride Month.

“The Madam’s Haunted Tomb” was part of the Ghosts in the Graveyard series on Roxanne Rhoads’s All Things Halloween blog. It appeared on 9/14/18.

I wrote about my “Ghost-Inspired Fiction” for the Halloween Haunts feature on the Horror Writers Association blog. It was published 10/18/18.

 

5 Questions for Claire Davon

[image error]Claire Davon is another of my sisters at Broad Universe, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting, encouraging, honoring, and celebrating women writers and editors in science fiction, fantasy, horror and other speculative genres.

Claire can’t remember a time when writing wasn’t part of her life. A native of Massachusetts and cold weather, she left all that behind to move to the sun and fun of California, but has always lived no more than twenty miles from the ocean. Claire has many book-irons in the fire, most notably her urban fantasy series, The Elementals’ Challenge series, but writes contemporary and shifter romances. In addition to writing, she enjoys animal rescue, reading, and movies. You can follow her work at http://clairedavon.com/blog/.

We sat down to chat about her novel, Shifting Auras.

Maya Wingfield was raised to trust no one—least of all the dueling U.S. and Russian paranormal agencies, Universe and Night Stars, who’d love to harness her mind-reading gift.

She thought Richmond a safe place to escape their influence and hide from a rising psychic malevolence that drove her out of San Diego. But when she gets yet another call to retrieve her drunken roommate, her mind shows her an amber-eyed Universe operative with an impenetrable net around his deepest secret—and a voice that sends shock waves of awareness down her nerve endings.

Maya’s curves and aquamarine eyes aren’t the only things that jolt Ian Sanderson’s mental shields, bringing sexual tension thrumming back to life. It’s a power his Universe-trained mind knows he shouldn’t trust. And a vulnerability that makes his telekinetic power burn in his palms to protect her.

But to Universe, she is just one of too many unanswered questions. A target for Whisper, a shadowy new group of paranormals with powers beyond anything Universe has ever seen. Once before, Ian failed to protect a sensitive from a brain-scrambling attack. He will not fail again… if it means using his talent—or his body—to stop a bullet.

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Did something in the real world inspire Shifting Auras?

I describe my book as X-men meets paranormal romance, so there wasn’t anything real world that inspired it. It evolved in part from a dream I’d had a long time ago, but took on a mind of its own as soon as I started writing it. I didn’t expect it to evolve the way it did, but I’m quite happy about that!

What is your favorite scene in the book?

There’s a fight scene toward the end where all of my characters have to use their various talents against their enemy, who has the power to dazzle all of them and bend them to his will. I had to write about psychic ability, invisibility, telekinesis, and weather powers—all within the same scene—while they fought against the dazzler. The challenge about writing a story/series like this is finding new and interesting powers for my characters while staying within the familiar. It was also an opportunity to show how much my heroine, the psychic/sensitive, has grown. She is instrumental in stopping the bad guy, something she couldn’t have imagined at the beginning of the book.

What was your writing process like as you wrote Shifting Auras?

My writing process is the same for most anything I write — that is to say, I slog through. I have a set number of words I write every day and I do that no matter what. In addition, I often edit and/or have another project I am working on at the same time, but I always get my words every day. I’m very much a pantser, so often times the story will take a left turn as I’m going. In the case of Shifting Auras, I actually added a major element to it after I finished it, because the feedback I’d gotten suggested that my world-building wasn’t strong enough. Turns out, that new element took the entire series to a different level.

What was the best thing that happened during your promotion of the book?

Soul Mate Publishing, my publisher, is very supportive of their writers, so I would have to say the community around the publisher and the various ways that the writers and staff give you unexpected opportunities to promote your book.

What do you have planned next?

I have a few irons in the fire. Right now, the second book in the Universe Chronicles series—following a different set of characters than Shifting Auras, but also showing the prior couple—is at the publisher for consideration. I also have a different series that I am self-publishing (Elementals’ Challenge) and am working on edits for the fourth book. In addition, I have some short stories being released by Weird Reader, Transmundane Press, and Fantasia Divinity in the next month or so.

Get a copy of Shifting Auras for yourself from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LcMsyB.

You can see all of Claire’s book on her Amazon page: https://amzn.to/2UwSRsi.

5 Questions for Catherine Lundoff

[image error]Catherine Lundoff is one of my sisters in Broad Universe, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting, encouraging, honoring, and celebrating women writers and editors in science fiction, fantasy, horror and other speculative genres.

Catherine is an award-winning writer, editor, and publisher from Minneapolis. Her books include Night’s Kiss, Crave, Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories, Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic, Silver Moon, and Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories. She is the publisher at Queen of Swords Press, a genre fiction publisher specializing in fiction from out of this world.

Her newest book is Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space).

Think pirates are all about the rum and the pieces of eight? Let these fifteen tales draw you into the adventures of a new kind of pirate. Sail with them as they seek treasure, redemption, love, and revenge. Raise the Jolly Roger and sharpen your cutlass (or recharge your raygun) and climb aboard for some unforgettable voyages. Featuring stories by Ginn Hale, A.J. Fitzwater, Geonn Cannon, Joyce Chng, Elliott Dunstan, Ashley Deng, Su Haddrell, Ed Grabianowski, Mharie West, Matisse Mozer, Soumya Sundar Mukherjee, Megan Arkenberg, Peter Golubock, Michael Merriam and Caroline Scoria.

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Did something in the real world inspire Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space)?

Most of the time, I’m a writer, but in this instance, I’ve just edited my third anthology, which was released on 12/1. Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) is an anthology of fantastical pirate stories. Stories range from the purely historical to a wide variety of fantastical settings to stories set in outer space. I’m a huge fan of pirates, both real and imaginary, and I gather my authors are, too! I don’t think I can narrow it down to one or two real pirates, though I do have my favorites.

What is your favorite story in the book?

As the editor, I can’t really play favorites and honestly, I have so many! I love them all, even though they are very different from each other. There are dark fantasy pirates, YA pirates, space pirates:  there’s plenty to choose from. Some of the amazing stories that I got included Elliott Dunstan’s “Andromache’s War,” a fantastical tale about Hector’s widow and what she does after the fall of Troy; Ashley Deng’s “The Seafarer,” about a Barbary Corsair piercing the veil between worlds to wreck vengeance on those who wronged him and his people; A.J. Fitzwater’s “Quest for the Heart of Ocean,” a fantasy pirate adventure featuring dapper lesbian capybara pirate captain, Cinrak, who’s also appeared in one of Fitzwater’s stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies; and Caroline Sciriha’s “A Crooked Path Home,” about a young space pirate who finds himself looking for redemption. There are also Viking pirates, mecha animals in the Indian Ocean, pirates in the swamps of Louisiana, marooned pirates, pirates in the South China Sea and more!

What was your process like as you edited the book?

When I wrote the CFS (Loren’s note: call for submissions), I explicitly stated that I wanted to see pirates from different parts of the world and different time periods. I was hoping to see submissions from international authors as well. I ended up getting just shy of 100 submissions from fourteen countries. Most of the stories came in through open submissions and I read them all. Since pirates can be found all around the world and in every time period, I wanted the final TOC to reflect that. I also wanted LGBTQ+ as well as heterosexual pirates and I wanted to be conscious about gender and author country of origin in the makeup of the final collection. The final TOC includes authors of different gender identities from 8 different countries, including the U.S., as well as the aforementioned wide range of pirate tales. The hard part for me was narrowing all those fun submission down to my final choices, and that I accomplished by reading and rereading. I picked my final fifteen stories, edited them, sent them to the authors for approval and/or changes, sent the next round off to a copyeditor, worked with the authors to make a few more changes and, voila!, instabook! By which I mean about 5-6 months worth of work.

What was the best thing that happened during your promotion of Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space)?

In the next couple of weeks, I’ve got two bookstore readings, three event tables and a couple of interviews, plus some online promotions. I’m hoping that all of them range from the good to the phenomenal. Right now, there’s all the anxiety of reading the early reviews – but we’re off to a good start!

What do you have planned next?

I’m the publisher at Queen of Swords Press so next up is working on author Alex Acks’s new steampunk book, which will be another series of linked steampunk novellas about Captain Marta Ramos, her crew and her compatriots. I’m also working on Blood Moon, the sequel to my menopausal werewolf novel Silver Moon and plan on putting that out later on next year. Depending on how things go, I’m hoping to open up to book length submissions for a bit and see what I get. The goal is to publish 2-3 books a year as long as I need to work full-time at a day job. I’m hoping that things take off, but better safe than sorry.

You can follow Catherine on her blog at https://catherineldf.dreamwidth.org/.

Her Amazon page is https://amzn.to/2UgPAgG.

And you can pick up a copy of Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) at https://amzn.to/2PlOBZc.

New Alondra stories

I’m really excited to announce some Alondra news:

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First off, one of her new adventures appeared in Weirdbook magazine.  It’s been a goal of mine to be published in Weirdbook forever, so this is a dream come true.  The story is set on Michigan’s Mackinaw Island, at the confluence of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan and between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas. (I’ve written about the place before in Wish You Were Here.)

You can get a copy of the magazine and check “Elle a Vu un Loup” out for yourself here. I’m excited to be sharing the table of contents with John Linwood Grant and Jessica Amanda Salmonson.

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Not out just yet — but coming very soon — is the next issue of Occult Detective Quarterly with another new Alondra story.  “Something in the Water” is set in San Francisco’s Academy of Science.  It was inspired by all the hours I spent there with my daughter when she was little.  Back then, the Academy was in a dark and ominous temporary building downtown while the beautiful new building was constructed in Golden Gate Park.  I was fascinated by the very long-lived sea bass…

The issue isn’t listed for sale yet, but keep an eye on Amazon or the Occult Detective site. It’s supposed to be out before the end of this year.

If you’ve been waiting to check out some previously published stories, I dropped the prices on the three Alondra collections available on Amazon:

Alondra’s Experiments: https://amzn.to/2KUtPPK
Alondra’s Investigations: https://amzn.to/2PgOoqb
Alondra’s Adventures: https://amzn.to/2Pged9J

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Finally, if you’re curious about Alondra and would like to read some (free!) flash fiction that will give you a little taste of her world, I’ve had two pieces up on Nina D’Arcangela’s blog.

[image error]“Letter from New Orleans” is about the first day Alondra was in the Crescent City and introduces characters who appear in “Last-Born,” the most anthologized Alondra story (most recently in Alondra’s Investigations): https://ninadarc.wordpress.com/2018/11/28/ladies-of-horror-flash-project-horror-author-loren-rhoads-morbidloren-sotet_angyal-loh-fiction-2/

[image error]“Mr. Moonlight” is the first story I’ve finished about Alondra’s childhood.  I’m really pleased with how it turned out.  Please take a look: https://ninadarc.wordpress.com/2018/10/28/ladies-of-horror-flash-project-horror-author-loren-rhoads-morbidloren-sotet_angyal-loh-fiction/

5 More Questions for Erika Mailman

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I met Erika Mailman last October when we both did SF in SF at the American Bookbinders Museum.  She struck me immediately as a kindred spirit. I’ve interviewed her before about her most recent book, The Murderer’s Maid.

Officially, Erika Mailman is the author of four historical novels: The Witch’s Trinity, a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book which Khaled Hosseini called “gripping;” Woman of Ill Fame, which is about a Gold Rush prostitute; House of Bellaver, a literary ghost story set in Oakland; and now The Murderer’s Maid: a Lizzie Borden Novel. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona, has been a Yaddo fellow, and served as a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards.

I asked her to come back to tell me about The Witch’s Trinity:

In 1507, when a severe famine strikes a small town in Germany, a friar arrives from a large city, claiming that the town is under the spell of witches in league with the devil. He brings with him a book called the Malleus Maleficarum—“The Witch’s Hammer”—a guide to gaining confessions of witchcraft, and promises to identify the guilty woman who has brought God’s anger upon the town, burn her, and restore bounty.

Güde Müller suffers stark and frightening visions—recently she has seen things that defy explanation. No one in the village know this and Güde herself worries that perhaps her mind has begun to wander—certainly she has outlived all but one of her peers in Tierkinddorf. Yet of one thing she is absolutely certain: she has become an object of scorn and a burden to her son’s wife. In these desperate times her daughter-in-law would prefer one less hungry mouth at the family table. As the friar turns his eye on each member of the tiny community, Güde dreads what her daughter-in-law might say to win his favor.

Then one terrible night Güde follows an unearthly voice and the scent of charred meat into the snow-filled woods. Come morning, she no longer knows if the horror she witnessed was real or imagined. She only knows that if the friar hears of it, she may be damned in this life as well as the next.

The Witch’s Trinity beautifully illuminates a dark period of history; it is vividly imagined, elegantly written, haunting, and unforgettable.

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Thank you, Loren, for having me on your blog again! Autumn is always our time of year, with the renewed interest in graveyards, witches and the eerily unexplainable.

Did something in the real world inspire The Witch’s Trinity?

Yes. I used to have a long commute and so I would listen to Great Lectures CDs in my car. I was deeply affected by one by Teo Ruiz called “The Terror of History,” about witchcraft. He mentioned a very strange statistic: that there were a lot of women accused of witchcraft in medieval Europe by their own daughters-in-law. Now, whenever I said that at a book event, I always was surprised by the laughter that broke out. I guess a lot of people have difficult relationships with their mothers-in-law, but I love mine! I was horrified by the idea that a family member (of sorts) would accuse another of witchcraft, knowing the usual outcome was execution.

My horror grew when he explained that that was often the case because resources were scant. If you don’t have enough food to feed everybody, of course you first want to feed growing children (who will go on to later feed you) and yourself and your workmeet… but the elderly woman who sits at the fire all day and doesn’t contribute to the household resources? Maybe it’s time for her to go. Starvation to that degree is a horror worse than anyone tormenting a summer camp in a hockey mask.

I built my novel The Witch’s Trinity around this statistic.

What is your favorite scene in the book?

There is a revenge scene that is very powerfully satisfying, but alas, I can’t talk about it without it being a plot spoiler! Suffice it to say, sometimes the powerless can have their day in court.

What was your writing process like as you wrote The Witch’s Trinity?

I worked from an outline and thus had a sort of “to do” list to work through. I kept one important thing open, though: whether my main character would live or die. I waited until I had written my way to the end to figure out the correct answer to that question.

One crazy thing happened while I was in the process of writing the novel. My mom emailed me, saying, “Here is a link to a website about our ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons, who was accused of witchcraft!” That was uncanny to the nth degree. I had been fascinated by witchcraft all my life, had even wished I had a witchcraft ancestor, and here it turned out I did, while I was writing about witches!

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Mary Bliss Parson’s monument, from the author’s collection.

Mary Bliss Parsons was accused and underwent trial twice (perhaps even a third time, but records were destroyed) and was acquitted. You don’t hear about that too often, but in the U.S. colonies, magistrates were far more likely to acquit witches than were their counterparts in medieval Europe. Note: Mary Bliss Parsons is a different person from Mary Parsons, who was also accused of witchcraft in the same town and same time. Here’s the website my mom sent me to: http://bit.ly/2O5G00F The image at the website is NOT Mary Bliss Parsons, and I’ve repeatedly asked the web masters to either label the painting correctly or take it off the site. Strangely enough, it looks like my mother, an 11th generation descendant.

I dedicated my novel to Mary Bliss Parsons and wrote an extensive Afterword about her that appears in the back of The Witch’s Trinity.

What was the best thing that happened during your promotion of the book?

Meeting other descendants. In fact, I go to the west coast Parsons Family Reunion! I see these fun people once a year and adore that connection.

If you ever wind up in Northampton, Massachusetts, there is a great historical society with the Nathaniel Parsons House, built on the site of Mary’s original homelot. Nathaniel was the grandson of Mary and her husband Cornet Joseph Parsons.

What do you have planned next?

I just finished a (very rough) draft of a new novel. I wanted to finish by the end of September, so on Sept. 30 I was trying to write the very last few paragraphs as I kept falling asleep. I did it by midnight, though! It’s a young adult novel about…you guessed it…witchcraft. I’m going to spend the next few weeks heavily editing and then seeking an agent to represent it. In the meantime, we just adopted a rescue puppy and so that has been taking quite a lot of energy and time and bringing lots of SMILES to our family!

Links:

Erika’s website: http://erikamailman.com/writing/the-witchs-trinity/

Erika’s blog: http://erikamailman.blogspot.com/

Follow Erika on Twitter: @ErikaMailman and on Instagram: @ErikaMailman

To buy The Witch’s Trinity:

Random House: http://bit.ly/2BZrJf4

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2PTpDW2

Barnes and Noble: http://bit.ly/2dpMYKc

 

The end of Nanowrimo 2018

[image error]Today is the last day of Nanowrimo 2018. My book isn’t finished, but I am oh so very close to making my 50,000 words for this year.

Today is bittersweet, because I still have at least another month’s work ahead of me to finish this draft, but the real end is within sight.  I just have to not get distracted by the holidays or the ongoing health dramas in my family.  I can do this.  I really want to see this book finished at last.

Earlier this week, we played a little game on Facebook where everyone was invited to list 5 unusual things about their work in progress. My list was this:

Succubus heroine
Gnostic angels
 2 (maybe 3) graveyards
 Griffith Observatory
Canter’s Deli egg creams

I was fascinated by the lists that everyone else came up with.  You can find them https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Floren.rhoads.5%2Fposts%2F10156017619067874&width=500” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>here, if you’re curious or would like to play.

[image error]So what’s this mysterious book I’ve been pounding away at all month?  It’s the sequel to Lost Angels, the novel about a succubus and her angel that came out several years ago.  Lost Angels ended with Lorelei being exorcised of the mortal girl’s soul that was possessing her.  Angelus Rose is about trying to find a place in the world when you’ve been fundamentally changed by love.  It’s still full of delicious horror, too.

I’ll be hosting another write-in at the Borderlands Cafe in San Francisco tonight from 5-7 pm.  Come by if you just need to knock out those last couple-thousand words.  If you’ve already finished, come along and get a jump on your revisions.

Either way, see you at the Nanowrimo TGIO party on December 6?

 

5 Questions for Marge Simon

[image error]Marge Simon lives in Ocala, Florida. She edits a column for the Horror Writers Association newsletter called “Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side” and serves on Board of Trustees.  She is the second woman to be acknowledged by the SF &F Poetry Association with a Grand Master Award. She has won three Bram Stoker Awards, Rhysling Awards for Best Long and Best Short Fiction, the Elgin, Dwarf Stars, and a Strange Horizons Readers’ Award. Marge’s poems and stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Silver Blade, Bete Noire, New Myths, Urban Fantasist, and Daily Science Fiction, to name a few. She attends the ICFA annually as a guest poet/writer and is on the board of the Speculative Literary Foundation.

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Marge describes War: Dark Poems:

War: Dark Poems is obviously not a novel. However you feel about poetry, I doubt you’ve ever read anything quite like my collaborative collection with Alessandro Manzetti from Crystal Lake Publications. The poems are vivid, fierce, sad, and horrific, and based on actual wars of all kinds through the ages.

Look at my million golden teeth necklace. Ring any bells? Maybe you’re too young. I probably should have mentioned the fireworks over the Baghdad night sky, my new friend, or the live broadcast of two great skyscrapers disintegrating. You know what I’m talking about, right? So, you can call me by one of my many names: Great General, Lock-box of the Powerful, Red Rain, Lord of Steel or, more simply, WAR.

I appear as strife of many kinds, from Stalingrad to Scotland. Africa to Afghanistan, the civil war of Italy and the War Between the States, ghostly wars, drug wars, the battle of the sexes, World Wars I, II and visions of a holocaust yet to come. It’s all herein and more, with poems both collaborative and individual.

Did something in the real world inspire your book?

I should say so! Wars and conflicts come in all forms as various as rainclouds and are among my favorite themes.

What is your favorite scene in the book?

It’s hard to pick just one collaborative poem, but for sheer horror about what happens to the soldier who takes a teenaged whore up on her offer, here are some lines from a favorite set in the Sixties: “Little Miss Saigon” (Alessandro’s lines). After researching what some of these young girls had in mind for gullible soldiers occupying their city, I wrote the ending. Believe me, it’s too shocking to include in an interview.

…her t-shirt that says

‘Black Clap’ in golden letters.

She’s playing with us, she smiles

and grabs my beer to have a little sip;

a healthy 14-year-old girl like her,

with those perfect white teeth,

can’t host the black eggs of syphilis.

It’s still too early for her,

even in this overturned paradise,

in this city where dust

doesn’t have time to settle down

before disappearing

dragged away together with the corpses.

As for independent poems of my own in this, I guess “General George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts” fits the bill, as it won a first place Rhysling Award last year!

It’s told by a young Black boy in Florida recounting his grandfather’s tale about what happened to the Blacks who joined the Yanks during the Civil War. He says the ghosts (haints) of that war rise up from the swamp on summer nights. Here are the last lines:

Granpappy almost starved,

beings how the soldiers got the food

and only scraps for the Brothers that survived;

still more drowned at Ebeneezer Creek

trying so hard to keep up,

a-marching straight to hell,

all the while still being slaves,

no better than the Rebs to them.

But them haints, General Sherman,

they all look the same.

What was your writing process like as you wrote the book?

Alessandro was the maestro. He measured the number of collaborations and individual poems we would need, and provided the start for our collabs. Sometimes we switched stanzas around to make the poem flow better. The book was a year in the making.

How about your promotion of the book?

Besides an interview in the June HWA Newsletter by Natching Kassa, I am awaiting an interview with questions for both Alessandro and me. Alessandro, editor Joe Mynhardt, and others have been posting news and info, plus the knock-out cover by Wendy Sabre-Core and fantastic interiors by Stefano Cardoselli, on the HWA FB page on Saturdays and to the public on Facebook.

What do you have planned next?

I have a new poetry and flash/prose poetry collection (tentatively titled Victims) in the works with Mary A. Turzillo. Satan’s Sweethearts, my last collaboration with Mary, was a Stoker Finalist this year. Our collection Sweet Poison was also a Stoker Finalist and won an Elgin Award in 2016.

Pick up a copy of War: Dark Poems on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LUBtt6.

Keep up with Marge:

Her homepage: http://www.margesimon.com/

The Literary Darkness Group on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/13824-literary-darkness

The Independent Legions publications page: http://www.independentlegions.com/

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How’s your novel coming?

I have to admit that I haven’t written a word in the last couple of days. Between family things, a trip to the circus, and a whole day of cooking, I have been slacking off on working on my book. You, too?

Luckily, tonight I’m hosting another Nanowrimo write-in at Borderlands Cafe on Valencia Street in San Francisco.  Come join me for a cup of tea and pounding out the words we need to get our books back on track.

The Borderlands Cafe is at 870 Valencia Street between 19th and 20th Streets. I’ll be there between 5-7 pm. Come join me at the tables in the back.

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5 Questions for Terrie Leigh Relf

[image error]I met Terrie Leigh Relf through her blog, where she’s done a long-running series of Day in the Life interviews with authors. I’ve had the honor of stopping by twice. I thought it would be fun to turn the tables on her.

Officially, Terrie Leigh Relf is a Lifetime Member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association and an Active member of the Horror Writers Association. In addition to being the editor and judge for Alban Lake Publishing’s somewhat quarterly drabble contest, she serves on the special projects committee. Tales from the Moonlit Path re-launched in time for Halloween and she returned as the poetry editor. In addition to being a published author, Relf is also a freelance writer, editor, content provider, and writing coach. You can learn more about her at https://tlrelf.wordpress.com and purchase her work at Alban Lake Publishing’s Infinite Realms Bookstore: https://www.infiniterealmsbookstore.com/search-results-page/Relf.

[image error]Her new book is called Sisterhood of the Blood Moon. For thousands of Earth years, the Transgalactic Consortium has had a quiet interest in this planet and its inhabitants, the Haurans. While the Sisterhood of the Blood Moon works together with the Consortium and Haurans to maintain balance in the universe, the Blood Moon is fast approaching. The power of this moon reveals untold secrets . . . including a sacred covenant with the Mora Spiders. There is an ancient pact that needs to be honored—but at what cost and for whose purpose? The world may come to an end. But will there be a chance for a new beginning?

Did something in the real world inspire Sisterhood of the Blood Moon?

It really does depend on individual viewpoints and experiences… While there was no singular event that inspired this book, it does resonate with events, practices, and other “real-life” occurrences. This includes, but isn’t limited to, UFO sightings, abductions, clandestine organizations, medical experiments (sanctioned and otherwise), virulent diseases, political intrigue, religious/spiritual orders and the roles they play, and the list goes on.

What is your favorite scene in the book?

I have several favorite scenes in the book, each for a different reason. No spoilers, though. One of my favorite scenes is early in the book where there is a Consortium meeting aboard the starship Blood Moon. I like this scene, because it reveals some of the various aliens involved along with details about The Pact and the centuries-long transgalactic trade agreement with Haura, or Earth. This scene also reveals that the mediator, Nareli, who is also a Reverend Mother in the Sisterhood of the Blood Moon, begins to suspect Hauran diplomat, Ms. Baxter, of harboring a secret or being otherwise engaged in an unauthorized project.

What was your writing process like as you wrote the book?

I must admit that this novel went through so many revisions that it was almost revised out of existence! Since Sisterhood of the Blood Moon is a stand-alone novel, but connected to my Boortean universe, one of my challenges was to make sure that I didn’t tread on Beacon Lights of Ranat, which is the actual sequel to The Waters of Nyr.

What was the best thing that happened during your promotion of Sisterhood of the Blood Moon?

Realizing that I need to engage in more self-promotion! That said, Alban Lake Publishing has been doing a stellar job of promoting it. Hearing congratulations from friends and colleagues was, and continues to be, so encouraging.

What do you have planned next?

I have several projects in process. Currently, I’m working on Beacon Lights of Ranat, which is the sequel to Waters of Nyr. You may be familiar with my poetry “handbook,” Poet’s Workshop—and Beyond! I’ve been meaning to finish Fiction Writers Workshop—and Beyond! for the past few years. It will have some reprinted articles as well as new ones. In addition to these projects, I’m nearing completion on Postcards from Space, a collection of poetry, most of which are haibun. I have other projects that I plan to return to after all of the above are “done!”

5 Questions for Alan M. Clark

[image error]I’ve been a fan of Alan M. Clark’s work for a really long time.  We met mumble-something years ago at one of the World Horror Conventions, when Alan was showing his paintings in the Art Show.  He painted an amazing painting for me and my husband—still one of my treasured possessions—and later wrote an incredible piece about his adventures in brain disease for my Morbid Curiosity magazine.

Officially, author and illustrator Alan M. Clark grew up in Tennessee in a house full of bones and old medical books. He has created illustrations for hundreds of books, including works of fiction of various genres, nonfiction, textbooks, young adult fiction, and children’s books. Awards for his work include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. He is the author of eighteen books, including twelve novels, a lavishly illustrated novella, four collections of fiction, and a nonfiction full-color book of his artwork. Mr. Clark’s company, IFD Publishing, has released 44 titles of various editions, including traditional books, audio books, and ebooks by such authors as F. Paul Wilson, Elizabeth Engstrom, and Jeremy Robert Johnson. Alan M. Clark and his wife, Melody, live in Oregon. You can check out his work at www.alanmclark.com.

Alan’s latest book is The Prostitute’s Price, a novel that beats back our assumptions about the time of Jack the Ripper. It’s not the grim story of an unfortunate drunken prostitute killed before her time, but one of a young woman alive with all the emotional complexity of women today. Her intellect and beauty, both blessing and curse, opened doors to both opportunity and threat. She saw lust as her means to lucre, her tender feeling toward one man as perilous, and the deadly obsession of another as merely the risk of her trade. Fleeing the hazards of love and running from a man wanting her to pay for her crimes against his brother, Mary Jane Kelly must recover a valuable hidden necklace and sell it to gain the funds to leave London and start over elsewhere. Driven by powerful, conflicting emotions, she runs the dystopian labyrinth of the East End, and tries to sneak past the deadly menace that bars her exit.

[image error]Did something in the real world inspire The Prostitute’s Price?

Yes, recognizing that history repeats itself in some interesting ways, especially in similarities between life in America today and life in Victorian London. That recognition lies at the heart of what inspired the Jack the Ripper Victims series, of which The Prostitute’s Price is the fifth and final volume.

Then as now, money was political and social power within a capitalist system. We are in a tech revolution today. The Victorian period saw the industrial revolution. The revolutions have similarities in their social impact: the large numbers of unemployed and homeless, the increasing power of those who provide employment to control working conditions and keep wages low, the laissez-faire capitalist tendencies of Victorian Great Britain and those of the United States, the vast gap between the haves and have-nots, the attitudes that some of the powerful take toward the poor: social Darwinist views that suggest that the struggle for life in human society is one of survival of the fittest.

I began the Jack the Ripper Victims series after reading the transcripts of the victims’ inquests and the police reports about the crimes attributed to the murderer. The parts of those documents that spoke specifically of the victims—their clothing, possessions, circumstances, lives—had the most impact on me. The first four victims were middle-aged women who had lost the man in their lives, their major breadwinner, and were living precariously, much of the time on the street. It’s believed that all four of those women were casual prostitutes. That meant that they supplemented their all too-meager incomes with occasional prostitution. There were countless such women on the streets of Victorian London. In the area of London’s East End, where most of the murders occurred, 500 to 800 people lived per acre.

And that brings up the relative value of single, middle-aged women in that British society. Small worth to employers, I’d say. The competition for jobs, especially with the untold numbers of children willing and needing to work to help their families survive, left many aging women out in the cold.

To avail oneself of the relief system—the workhouses, the casual wards, the infirmaries—would have been much like willingly going to prison, where the inadequate food and accommodations were earned through hard labor, much like that given convicted felons in actual prisons of the time. Occasional prostitution would seem a reasonable alternative.

The going rate for a casual prostitute was 4 pence. For the American reader, translate “pence” into “penny.” The going rate for a quatern of gin—a quarter of a pint—3 pence. A share of a bed in a doss house—flophouse for the American reader—was 4 pence. A loaf of bread 2 pence. Within those numbers and choices, I find a cruel hand to play. With few funds, on what should she place her bet: a piece of a bed, drink, bread, or should she begin the search for another client? In a similar circumstance, which would you choose?

The first couple of JTR’s victims might not have suspected they were exposed to unusual danger on the streets. The third, fourth, and fifth? What made it seem reasonable to them to be searching through dark slums for strangers to pay them for sex?

Truly, it is that sort of question that makes me want to tell a story from history: what made the decisions of those women reasonable within that dire context?

In our time, what similar desperate choices must the unemployed, homeless person make with the hand they’re dealt? Perhaps our safety net in the U.S. is much better than what Londoners had in the 1880s, but plenty of those currently in power look for ways to weaken it every day.

And has enough changed for women? Not to my liking. For many, women are still the second-class citizens they were meant to be in the Victorian period. I thinking that in a time of the #MeToo movement and increased awareness of the abuse of women, stories about 1888’s Autumn of Terror should not glorify Jack the Ripper as daring. Instead, they should show the humanity of his female victims. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

The Prostitute’s Price is about the life of Mary Jane Kelly. Unlike the victims before her, she had been a professional prostitute associated with a high-end brothel until she fell to street-level soliciting due to troubles in her life.

The other titles in the series are:

1) Of Thimble and Threat (about the life of Catherine Eddowes)

2) Say Anything but Your Prayers (about the life of Elizabeth Stride)

3) A Brutal Chill in August (about the life of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols)

4) Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man (about the life of Annie Chapman)

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The stories take place primarily in London during the middle to late Victorian Period, roughly between 1850 and 1890. They are character-driven dramas based on what is known of the victims’ lives. They can be read in any order.

Actually, there is a memoir/horror fiction novel that is sort of a secret, meta volume in the JTR Victims series, titled The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir. Most people do not know I consider it part of the series. It reveals a lot about why I got involved in the project and how it’s effected my life. It is a very strange beast of a book, an exciting crime thriller as well as being partly true.

What is your favorite scene in The Prostitute’s Price?

The erotic scene between Mary Jane Kelly and Joseph Fleming in chapter 11. The complexity of her feelings was fun to portray.

What was your writing process like as you wrote The Prostitute’s Price?

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Interior illustration from Of Thimble and Threat by Alan M. Clark

Loose outline based on what is known of Mary Jane Kelly’s history, much research—most of it done online, looking for the emotional threads in her story. The novel, like the earlier ones in the series, is strictly from the POV of one character, the female victim. None of the books in the series are about Jack the Ripper, yet they all do end with murder.

With The Prostitute’s Price, I had difficulty starting because the crime scene photo so discouraged me.

While considering how to begin, John Linwood Grant asked me to write the introduction to his “Tales of the Last Edwardian” collection, A Persistence of Geraniums. In its pages, I found John’s great character, Edwin Dry, the Deptford Assassin. I’d read a couple of stories about him already. He is an extremely capable, dispassionate assassin: one might at first think a sociopath. He will take a job from just about anyone to kill just about anyone as long as the job is earnestly offered. The pay for the job is important to Dry, but the amount seems to concern him the least. In one of the stories, John gives a short history of how Edwin Dry gained his reputation. Some of that involved Jack the Ripper in a manner that gave me an idea. I do not want to give anything away here, but I will say that it gave me heart, and I was able to move forward with the last book in the series.

I asked John to work with me on it and for us to employ his creation, Edwin Dry, as a character in the story. He agreed, but then the idea kept evolving. We decided that each of us would have his own POV character for the novel, so our different “voices” wouldn’t become a problem. Our chapters would alternate. With time, we came to the conclusion that we were writing two separate novels, and settled on that as part of our goal. Mine, The Prostitute’s Price, is from the POV of Mary Jane Kelly, and is the final book in my JTR Victims Series, standing on its own as the others in the series do. His, The Assassin’s Coin—also capable of standing on its own—is from the POV of a spiritualist woman name Catherine Weatherhead, about the same age as Mary Jane Kelly. It is a very different story that takes place in the same timeline. The two “companion novels,” as we call them, share some scenes and some characters, including Edwin Dry, the Deptford Assassin.

The Prostitute’s Price was released on September 10. The Assassin’s Coin came out on October 10. The two novels will appear together in a third volume titled 13 Miller’s Court, in which the chapters alternate. That came out on November 9, 2018, the 130th anniversary of Mary Jane Kelly’s death. For a larger experience of each novel, we say, read both. All three novels are from IFD Publishing.

What was the best thing that happened during your promotion of the book?

A couple of things. The first had to do with the titles for the novels. I presented the title for mine, The Prostitute’s Price, to John and asked if he might come up with one for his novel that complimented my title in length and had a similar possible multiple meaning. This was in part because I wanted the book covers to have much the same design. He offered The Assassin’s Coin, which is perfect in ways that I cannot explain without giving things away. Trust me when I say he was brilliant to come up with that title.

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Interior illustration from Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man by Alan M. Clark

The other has to do with a review. Halfway through writing the JTR Victims series, David Green, the fiction editor for Ripperologist magazine, contacted me and asked for a review copy of A Brutal Chill in August, the novel about Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, published by Word Horde. It seems he’d known my artwork from the book covers I’d done over the years, had become curious about the first two books in the series, got them, and read them. He’d contacted me for A Brutal Chill in August because, as he said, the first two in the series had been among the best Ripper fiction he’d read. This is a man who knows quite a lot about the subject matter, the investigations, and what life was like in 19th century London. The review he produced for A Brutal Chill in August was a glowingly positive one. When Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man came out, he gave another extremely positive review. The review for The Prostitute’s Price in Ripperologist #162 is the most wonderful of all, winding up with the statement, “I regard the five books that make up this series as unarguably one of the high points in Ripper fiction over the past 130 years.”

As you can imagine, I was very pleased.

What do you have planned next?

Oh, shit, I don’t know. Let me take a few breaths and ask me again later. Thanks for the interview, Loren.

My pleasure, Alan!

You can pick up The Prostitute’s Price on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2JnTVd7

Or check out all the rest of Alan’s books here: https://amzn.to/2DaPnqd

Or check out his web page at www.ifdpublushing.com