Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 3

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.

Wish You Were Here turns 7

Seven years ago tomorrow, the second edition of my cemetery memoir came out from Automatism Press. Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel gathered essays I’d written for Gothic Net, Cemetery Travel, and a bunch that were written specifically for the book. It spanned my cemetery travels from falling in love with cemetery angels in Highgate Cemetery to dodging tornadoes to see a “Christianized Indian” burial ground in Michigan, with stops all over the world.

In honor of the book’s birthday, I thought I’d post an interview I did for Travel & Leisure in October 2014 to promote the first edition of Wish You Were Here. The story is no longer on their site, but it was a great conversation.

Travel & Leisure:  Although visiting a cemetery is not a usually a bucket list attraction when planning a trip, do you think it should be? If so, why?

Loren:  People may already have cemeteries on their bucket lists without even realizing it. The Taj Mahal and the Pyramids in Egypt are tombs.  Stonehenge and Pearl Harbor are graveyards. Almost every tourist destination has people buried in it: the Vatican, Yosemite, Manhattan, the Caribbean. That’s to say nothing of visiting the graves of famous people like Elvis at Graceland or Marilyn Monroe in Los Angeles, Jim Morrison in Paris or Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta.  Sometimes it’s a matter of realizing what you’re already looking at.

Personally, nothing makes me happier to be alive than spending a little time in a beautiful cemetery, watching the squirrels play, listening to the birds sing, and smelling the flowers.  Every day aboveground is a good day, right?

Travel & Leisure:  In your opinion, what can one glean from visiting a cemetery?

Loren: That’s a huge question!  Cemeteries can teach us about local or national history. Their statuary and symbolism make them great outdoor art museums. Birders and natural history enthusiasts go to cemeteries to add to their life lists. Gardeners and landscape aficionados look for native plants or antique flora that may not survive anywhere else.

What I like best in a cemetery are its stories — not just the famous ones about well-known people or big events, but the love stories, the grudges, the things that people treasure, their hopes and heartbreak:  the stories told on headstones.  Visiting cemeteries, particularly on vacation, helps me understand what the surrounding community values.  It makes me feel more connected to people, to the past, and to life itself.

Travel & Leisure:  As a blogger that specializes in cemetery travel, are there any tour companies that offer cemetery trips? If so, which one’s are your favorite?

Loren:  I don’t know of any US companies that offer solely cemetery-focused tours, although cities like Boston, Savannah, and Los Angeles offer tours of their local burial grounds.  In this country, it’s usually cemeteries themselves or local historical societies who offer tours, especially this time of year.  If there’s a cemetery that intrigues you, it’s worth calling the cemetery office and asking if they have something scheduled or can recommend a local guide.

Europe has the European Cemeteries Route, which connects 63 cemeteries in 50 cities across 20 European countries.  It’s a self-guided tour designed to promote heritage and tourism, developed by the Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe (ASCE).

I wish we had something like that in America.

Travel & Leisure:  Can you talk about the Taphophile community? Is it large? Are there local chapter groups to join?

Loren:  In the 20 years since I began visiting cemeteries, the practice has gone from furtive to a source of pride for a surprising number of people.  A lot of that interest is due to the increasing number of genealogists, who start off visiting family graves and discover how fascinating and individual graveyards can be.

My favorite international group of taphophiles is the Association for Gravestone Studies, which has US chapters and members worldwide.

Facebook lists more than a hundred cemetery groups, some with thousands of members.  Whether your interest is Presidential Graves or Cemetery Animals, there is a group for you.

At the local level, people should check with their community historical associations or with the cemeteries themselves.  Many cemeteries have “Friends” organizations that offer tours to raise money for research, restoration, and preservation.

Travel & Leisure:  Any hot tips on getting the most out of a cemetery visit?

Loren:  Look first for a tour.  A good tour guide can really bring a cemetery to life.  You might also be able to find a guidebook:  Douglas Keister has a series about the graveyards of Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and the American South that are fun and full of beautiful photos, but there are getting to be more and more books about individual cemeteries worldwide.  In this country, Images of America offer a whole selection.  For an overview, my book Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel explores burial traditions and history around the world in the context of graveyards I’ve visited on vacation.  It’s a good place to start.

There’s a wonderful crowd-sourced cemetery encyclopedia online called Find a Grave that can serve as a jumping off point for a cemetery visit, too.  It’s not 100% comprehensive, but it’s full of fascinating information.  It can definitely give you the highlights of your local burial ground.

Finally, Cemeterytravel.com focuses on cemeteries as vacation destinations.  It lists graveyards from the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco to George Washington’s grave at Mount Vernon and around the world from London to Prague to Tokyo and more.  The featured Cemetery of the Week list is nearly 150 entries long.  Turns out, there really are graveyards everywhere you go.

The Dangerous Type is 9

Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of the first of my space opera novels, The Dangerous Type. I can’t believe it’s been out such a long time!

Writing a space opera trilogy was the dream of my lifetime. It was an honor to work with Jeremy Lassen, who let me get away with pretty much every crazy idea I came up with.

In honor of the book’s birthday, I thought I’d give you a little taste of the first chapter. Of course it begins in a cemetery:

According to plan, they’d wriggle into the tomb one at a time.  Kavanaugh always went first. He was the crew boss, hence the most expendable if they tripped a booby-trap. It was a point of honor for him that he didn’t ask the men to do anything he wouldn’t volunteer for himself. It made him better than Sloane. Besides, Curcovic always joked, Kavanaugh would need the others to figure out how to free him if the slab slipped.

Kavanaugh always had a moment, as he slithered past the edge of a slab, when he feared it would rock back into place and crush him. Or worse, it would rock back after he’d passed it, trapping him inside the tomb. No telling how long it would take someone to die inside one of those graves, how long until the air ran out or dehydration made breathing cease to matter. It wasn’t as if Sloane would feel he had enough invested in the team to rescue anyone. Kavanaugh wouldn’t put it past the boss to decide it was more cost effective to simply hire new men, leaving the originals behind as a warning to be more careful.

Most of the tombs they’d entered had warehoused whole companies of bugs, the dead warriors of a single campaign buried together. Kavanaugh played his light around the inside this cavern but found only a single catafalque, an uncarved slab of obsidian in the rough center of the room. Whoever lay atop it must be important, he thought. Shouldn’t take too long to loot one body. Maybe there would actually be something worth stealing this time.

Kavanaugh peeled off his face shield and lifted the flask, sucking down the last half of its contents as the men converged on the catafalque. His boot knocked something over. When he bent down to retrieve it, he found a human-made electric torch. Damn. Had someone beaten them to this one?

“What’s a human girl doing in here?” Taki asked.

“There’s your dancing girl,” Curcovic teased. “Maybe you can wake her with a kiss.”

“ ’Cept for the dust,” Lim commented.

“Well, yeah, ’cept for the dust, Lim. Damn, man, don’t you have any imagination?”

“Just what did you have in mind?” Lim asked skeptically.

“Are you sure she’s human?” Kavanaugh asked as he slipped the flask back inside his coat.

“I think she’s just a kid,” Curcovic added.  “No armor.  You think she was somebody important’s kid?”

“She’s the best thing I’ve seen on this rock so far,” Taki pointed out. His hand wiped some of the dust from her chest.

Kavanaugh was crossing the uneven floor to join them when a low female voice said clearly, “No.”

Curcovic stumbled backward, dropping his torch and fumbling at the gun at his hip.  The corpse sat up, straight-arming her fist into Taki’s face. Stunned, he cracked his head on the stone floor when he went down. He lay still at the foot of the catafalque.

Lim backed away, light trained on the figure rising in the middle of the tomb. It was hard for Kavanaugh to make her out in the unsteady light: a slip of a girl dressed in gray with a cloak of dusty black hair that fell past her knees.

Curcovic finally succeeded in drawing his gun. The girl darted sideways faster than Kavanaugh could follow in the half-light. A red bolt flashed out, blinding in the darkness. Lim collapsed to the floor, cursing Curcovic.

The girl rounded on Curcovic, turning a one-handed cartwheel that left her in range to kick the gun from his hand. She twisted around, nearly too quick to see, and cracked her fist hard into his chest. Curcovic fell as if poleaxed. Lim groaned from the floor, hands clasped over his belly.

None of the men were dead yet, Kavanaugh noticed. She could have killed them as if they’d been standing still, but she’d disabled them instead. He suspected that was because they posed no real threat to her. Maybe she needed them alive. He hoped that was true.

Cold sweat ran into Kavanaugh’s eyes. He held the flask in his gun hand. He’d have to drop it to draw his weapon. If the noise caught her attention, he’d be headed for the ground before his gun barrel cleared his holster.

“We didn’t mean you any harm,” he said gently as he let go of the flask.

***

Enslaved, trained as a killer, entombed, and abandoned: you can see why Raena Zacari might have a chip on her shoulder. In the grimdark universe of this propulsive action-heavy debut, the universe’s deadliest assassin sets off on a mission of vengeance into a galaxy destabilized by genocidal warfare. Her target — the despotic warlord Thallian — is on the run for war crimes but determined to reclaim what he believes is his by right. Along with a supporting cast of smugglers, black market doctors, and ne’er-do-wells sprawled across a galaxy brimming with alien life, The Dangerous Type is a fantastic beginning to Loren Rhoads’s epic trilogy.

The Dangerous Type is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or at Biblio. You can also get a copy directly from my bookstore.

It’s also available as an audiobook.  Here’s the link. Check out the first chapter for free.