Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 3

Spooky Stories Night

Let’s get October started! This Saturday night (October 12) at 7 PM, I’ll be joining Francesca Maria, Tamika Thompson, and Alex Brown at Telegraph Hill Books to read you some spooky stories.

Telegraph Hill Books is in a beautiful airy space at 1501 Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.

Doors open at 6:30, if you like to mingle.

Get details and your free ticket via Eventbrite.

I’m not sure yet what I’m going to read…probably something from my collection Unsafe Words. Something to raise goosebumps, I promise.

They should have copies of 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die for sale, too, if you’d like to take a look at it.

I’m really looking forward to it. I’m excited to hear Francesca Maria read finally. I’m overdue. And I haven’t met Tamika or Alex yet, so that’s going to be fun, too. Unfortunately, L.S. Johnson isn’t going to be able to join us, but she’ll be there in spirit, I’m sure.

Hope to see you there!

Catching up with 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die

Last Saturday, I hit another milestone. Matthew Kronsberg interviewed me for the Wall Street Journal. The story appeared on Saturday as “When Did Cemeteries Become Tourist Attractions and Hot-Date Spots?”

The Petaluma Argus-Courier wrote about “Digging Tombstones: A Grave Pastime in Words and Pictures” in advance of my book-signing at the Word Horde Emporium of the Weird and Fantastic.

Author, podcaster, and world-traveling taphophile Tui Snider had some really sweet things to say about 222 Cemeteries on her patreon. My publicist’s favorite part?

I have a lull this weekend before the month gets really busy with cemetery events, but you can see what’s coming up here:

222 Cemeteries at the Word Horde Emporium

This weekend, I’m doing my first bookstore event for 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die! Owner Ross Lockwood made a really fun introduction to my book on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_OdGwUSRaR/.

This Sunday, September 29, from 1-3 pm, I’ll be signing copies of my books in Petaluma, California at the amazing Word Horde Emporium of the Weird & Fantastic. The shop’s address is 2200 Petaluma Boulevard North #805. It’s in the Petaluma Village Premium Outlets across from the Express.

I cannot wait for you to check this shop out!

While you’re in Petaluma, give yourself an hour or more to explore the city’s lovely historic Cypress Hill Cemetery at 430 Magnolia Avenue. You can thank me later.

If you can’t make it up to Petaluma but you’d like a signed copy of 222 Cemeteries, contact Ross at https://www.weirdandfantastic.com/.

Doing things that scare me

Last weekend, I did my first lecture live over Zoom. I’ve been to a huge number of lectures, slide shows, and classes online, but every time I’ve done a presentation of my own at an online conference, it was either a live conversation without slides or else I recorded my speech in advance.

I could’ve done that again this time. It would’ve been fine to record my talk and then taken questions live afterward. Instead, I wanted the challenge of doing everything live, just so I could have the experience of troubleshooting things on the fly. I felt like my local HWA chapter was a safe audience. They would be supportive if I screwed everything up somehow: dropped my notes, lost the Zoom, the cat screamed from the next room….

And for all my jitters beforehand, it went fine. I would’ve liked to do the lecture without reading it, but I’ve never been able to get off book before and that felt like too much to ask of myself this time. Maybe next time?

As it was, my tongue did get tangled up at one point and I had to stop to take a sip of tea, but I’m human, so I cut myself some slack and moved on. It was a lesson that I value in retrospect.

This weekend, I’ve set myself another challenge. The historic Union Cemetery in Redwood City, California has invited me down to assist in a cemetery tour this Saturday. For all the cemetery tours I’ve taken over the years, I’ve never had the nerve to lead one myself.

I’m going to be joining Kathleen Klebe, who is the president of the Historic Union Cemetery Association. She’ll be talking about the local history recorded in the cemetery, while I explain the iconography and symbolism on the gravestones. I am really excited to have the opportunity to help out on this tour!

Also, I’ll have a handful of copies of 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die for sale.

If you’re local and would like to join us, here’s their announcement:

You won’t want to miss the Sept. 14th tour of Union Cemetery in Redwood City. In addition to a Union Cemetery Board member talking about the local history, we will have a special guest joining as well. Loren Rhoads will be adding her expertise to our tour, talking about the meanings and symbolism of our headstone images. Loren is the author of 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die & Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. She blogs about cemeteries as travel destinations at CemeteryTravel.com.The tour starts at 10am, is an easy walk and FREE. We hope you can join us for this interesting tour.Union Cemetery, 316 Woodside Road, Redwood City, California, United StatesHere’s their website: https://historicunioncemetery.org/

One of the stones I’m excited about is this one, with Death counting the curls on the virgin’s head.

Whistling Past the Graveyard this weekend

The first of my cemetery events is this weekend!

On Sunday, September 8, at 1 pm, I’m going to talk about ghost stories in US graveyards to my local Horror Writers Association group. If you’re a member of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter, I hope you’ll join us at our monthly meeting on Zoom.

If you’re not a member — or not a horror writer — this is a lecture I love to give. I gave a longer version several years ago to a packed audience at StokerCon on the haunted Queen Mary. This time around, I’m focusing on stories about Marie Laveau’s grave, Resurrection Mary, and the gate to Hell in Kansas, among others. My point is: this talk can be shrunk or expanded to fill your time frame. There are a wealth of spooky tales to tell.

If you have a group who’d like to hear some stories about ghosts, graveyards, and the power of urban legends, comment below or drop me a note on my contact form.

222 Cemeteries is out in the world

What a week it’s been! 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die came out on Tuesday and debuted as a best seller on Amazon. It was #1 in both Landmarks and Monuments and in Pictorial Travel. Those are firsts for me.

The first of the new reviews went up at HorrorAddicts.net. They had this to say: “Whether you are stunned into silence by its gorgeous photography or even more inspiring text, you will be launched into another state of mind.”

Parade magazine added the book to their list of Best New Books: The 27 Best New Book Releases This Week: Aug 27-Sept 2, 2024 – Best Reads on Parade

All of my podcast interviews have broadcast:

Dylan Thuras and I have corresponded since back in the days of my Morbid Curiosity magazine. Needless to say, I am a huge fan of Atlas Obscura. I even used to set up cemetery tours for the local Obscura Salon group. Dylan and I discussed the question “Are Cemeteries Dying?” on his Atlas Obscura podcast. Click on the graphic for the Apple podcast or listen on Spotify.

I also chatted with A. S. Stewart about cemeteries on the Shadows and Ink podcast. My cat Nocturne chimed in, too. Listen here.

Patricia from the Morbidly Curious Book Club and I had an amazing conversation about Morbid Curiosity and cemeteries. So much fun!

One final thing: the Order of the Good Death is giving away a copy of 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die on twitter (or X, if you insist). You can check out the giveaway here.

You can order your own copy of 222 Cemeteries from your favorite bookstore or online here.

How to update a book when your father is dying

In August 2022, my father fell in a gas station parking lot in Michigan. It wasn’t uncommon for him to fall, but he was too proud to use a cane. This time, it took three men to help him up and get him into my mom’s Equinox. She drove him to the Emergency Room in Flint. Turns out that he had fractured his pelvis.

My dad had his first catastrophic heart attack in 1992. Thirty years of heart disease had whittled him away. He was too fragile for surgery to repair the broken bone. He remained confined to a hospital bed for nine weeks while they waited for the bone to heal on its own.

I was in the midst of finishing Death’s Garden Revisited. The books came from the printer in October. I packed the copies for the Kickstarter supporters and got on a plane as soon as he came home from the hospital.

At the end of November, I got an email from one of the editors at Black Dog & Leventhal, which had published 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die in 2017. She said, “We have been discussing updating some books and 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die is on that list. It seems to us that cemetery tourism keeps getting more and more popular.”

It’s a moment a writer dreams of: when your book has made the publisher so happy that they not only want to keep it in print, they want to give you a chance to expand it. I had to be honest with them, though: I knew that bad falls often began the cascade of failures that kill most elderly people. My dad didn’t want live-in help. He didn’t want help of any kind. I’m an only child, so I had to find a way to help my mom care for him.

The publisher understood that my father wasn’t well and that I was traveling back and forth to Michigan. They were thinking of a publication date in August 2024, which — in December 2022 — seemed very far away. We signed a contract.

Toward the end of January 2023, I started the conversation about what they wanted me to add. I wanted to fill in the American states I’d missed in the first volume. The editor batted the question back to me: what had readers felt was missing from the first book? Could I add more international cemeteries, more tourist destinations?

The day after I got her email, Dad entered the hospital for the last time. He might have had a stroke. His kidneys were failing. Mom and I refused surgery to prepare him for dialysis. The hospital released him to a nursing home. I was finally able to talk my mom into setting up hospice care.

Dad seemed somewhat stable then, so I went back to California and researched like a crazy person. Two weeks later, I submitted my list of new cemeteries to write about.

The following week, the hospice nurse called to tell me it was time to come back. Dad died before I got off the plane.

March passed in a blur of planning the funeral and buying a headstone, trying to sort out my parents’ taxes, making sure the farm could continue to run and someone would harvest the crops when the time came. I tried to line up people to spy on my mom and let me know if she needed anything. The deadline to turn in the new cemetery entries was the end of April, so I went back to California again and put my head down over my research.

Mom had a stroke on April 19. I printed out everything I could, xeroxed pages from my cemetery library, and flew back to Michigan. While Mom was hospitalized, I held myself to drafting a new cemetery piece or two each day. The work needed to be done and I was learning so much. To be honest, I found it a relief to have something to escape to.

I took my mom out for lunch and we celebrated my dad’s birthday for the first time without him.

When Mom was released from the hospital, it was with the understanding that I would find assisted living for her. She could feed herself and dress, but something had happened to the language part of her brain and she couldn’t communicate. The hospital called it “word salad.” It would have been fascinating if it hadn’t been so terrifying.

I packed up my childhood home, moved Mom into a retirement community where the nurses would come three times a day to make sure she took her meds, and rushed back to California to finish writing about the new 23 cemeteries. I turned them in a month after my deadline — yay, me! — and began updating the text of the original 199 cemeteries.

The first six months of 2023 were among the most challenging and exhausting of my life. My editor Lisa Tenaglia was always patient and kind. I think both of us were relieved when I turned in the updates and they could begin the design.

We went through several rounds of proofreading and tweaking, but everything was really, most sincerely done in December. In January 2024, I saw the new cover. I felt something unhitch in my chest. This book was going to be a thing of beauty. I was immensely proud of what I had been able to accomplish, despite everything.

Despite everything, 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die will be out as contracted next week! Click the link to be taken to the universal sales page. Hachette and Amazon are having a sale.

Coming August 27, 2024:

10 days until 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die

Do you feel like the summer has flown by? Halloween decorations have been in the stores for over a month and the trees are starting to turn, as much as they ever do, in San Francisco. The days are getting noticeably shorter. Autumn is waiting in the wings.

And the new edition of my cemetery book is out on August 27! My publisher describes it this way: Loren Rhoads’ hauntingly beautiful guide to the world’s most interesting and unusual cemeteries has been revised and updated to include twenty-three additional locations, and it serves as both a useful trip-planning tool and a browser’s delight.⁣
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Entries include: ⁣
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Japan’s Mount Koya cemetery ⁣
Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery ⁣
Rome’s Il Cimitero Acattolico ⁣
Monaco Cemetery
Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis
Milan’s Monumental Cemetery
⁣
And more! Taphophiles and tourists alike can find this stunning book at https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/loren-rhoads/222-cemeteries-to-see-before-you-die/9780762486021/.⁣

Both Hachette and Amazon are having a sale if you preorder now.

National Planner Day 2024

August 1 is National Planner Day, celebrated since 2018 by people who love planners. This is my first time celebrating!

I came late to planners. I worked my way through a stack of to-do lists and productivity forms, but I always ended up with lists in my notebooks, on pretty notepads, and on random scraps of paper. I tried using online planners like Trello and Todoist, but I found that I didn’t open them every day, so they served as dumping grounds for my lists but didn’t help things actually get done.

During the Covid lockdown, my friend E.S. Magill suggested Sarra Cannon’s Heart Breathings system. At its heart, it’s a quarterly planner, but the program includes a lot of journaling exercises, an inspiration board, and a complicated series of calculations about how much time you have to do your creative work. I found some of it really inspiring and other parts overwhelming.

I asked my friend Emerian Rich if she could help me design a planner just for me. It would have forms I’ve found useful: a monthly goal-setting page, weekly and yearly recaps, lots of lined pages for making lists, and tracking pages for contacts, submissions, newsletter and blog planning, mind maps, project planners, and so much more.

Emerian, bless her heart, said that if we would going to work so hard to get this planner right, we should make it available to other writers. So we did.

The Spooky Writer’s Planner includes:

13 months of monthly and weekly spreadsMonthly goal and recap sheetsWeekly check-ins and note pagesWriting challenges, planners, and instructionsSubmission, published work, and contact trackersMarketing, newsletter, and blog plannersCheck-off sheets for website maintenance, social media profiles, and expensesFun sheets to generate writing ideas, track your favorite TV series, and to be read or watched listsHOW CAN YOU GET ONE?

DIGITAL: Get one immediately from Etsy! The quick-download version gives you a digital copy so you can print the pages you want, print multiples of those you think you’ll use the most, and leave those you won’t use. These pages are designed to be printed on 8.5 x 11-inch paper. You can put them in a three-ring binder or bind them with disks or a spiral, as you choose. You can even print different sheets on different colored papers. Create your own Frankenstein’s Monster of a planner!

PRINT: Order a paperback copy from Amazon! The Spooky Writer’s Planner is perfect-bound with a glossy cover, printed on high-quality 8.5 x 11-inch paper. Everything you need is included in one handy book that you can just grab and go. Have book, will travel!

New Alondra story

Want to add a shiver to your summer? I had a brand-new very short Alondra story go up as part of the Ladies of Horror Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge.

Every month, members of the Ladies of Horror Facebook group volunteer to write a short story or a poem based on a photo prompt. Then ringleader Nina D’Arcangela sends out a handful of photos. The fun comes in when those of us who get the same photo compare our stories as they’re published. The stories are always amazingly different.

My prompt this month was:

So of course I wrote about taking a bath in a haunted house.

You can read my story here or you can listen to Elaine Pascal reading it on youtube.