Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 37

199 Cemeteries at Ipso Facto

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Just a reminder that I’ll be at the legendary Ipso Facto at 517 N. Harbor Boulevard in Fullerton, California tonight at 5:30 pm to sign copies of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die.  I’ll also have copies of Morbid Curiosity #10, Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, and the revised edition of Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travels.

Come tell me about your own cemetery travels.

199 Cemeteries at Stories Books & Cafe

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Just a reminder that I’ll be at Stories Books & Cafe at 1716 W. Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles tonight at 8 pm.  I’ll read a little bit of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and then we’ll talk about cemeteries past and future.

Hope to see you there!

Taking my Morbid Curiosity on the Road

It’s an annual tradition that I post my true Halloween story “The Mortician’s Gift.” This is a reminder that I’ll be on tour in Southern California in support of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die.

The SoCal dates for the 199 Cemeteries Fall 2017 book tour are:

October 17 @ 8 pm: Stories, Echo Park
October 18 @ 5:30 pm: Ipso Facto, Fullerton
October 20 @ 7:30 pm: Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego
October 21 @ 4 pm: Dark Delicacies, Burbank

Come tell me about your favorite cemetery.

My Memorial Tattoo

[image error]My brother died suddenly at the age of 36. Today would have been his 52nd birthday. When he died, I felt as if I’d lost an arm.

Allen and I hadn’t been close as kids, but as two kids growing up in the country, we often were all we had to amuse ourselves. I didn’t really start to appreciate him until I left home.

After his death, I started to think about getting a memorial tattoo. My brother lived in the country. He collected model tractors. He liked to snowmobile and go hunting. He liked to be alone in the woods. None of those were the reason I loved him, so it was hard to find an image to encapsulate all I wanted to say.

Before his death, I’d gotten tattoos to symbolize earth, water, and air. I struggled to come up with an emblem for fire. I didn’t want a salamander or a succubus, even though I’d written about one. Anyway, big red tattoos tend to look like burn scars from a distance. I wanted something subtler.

The more I thought about it, I wanted my fire tattoo to symbolize the purifying power of fire, not its destructive aspect. Allen’s death was the fire that burned away my old life as a sister and gave me a new life as a mom. More than that, his early death made me realize that I couldn’t continue to wait to get my books published. I needed to get serious, to buckle down and get the job done. Losing him made me realize how short my time might be.

When I finally hit on the idea of a phoenix, the symbolism seemed completely obvious. The metaphor for San Francisco, my home, is a phoenix. A number of destructive fires swept through the city in its early years. The last great fire was in 1906, after the earthquake. I even crawled out of bed to attend to the predawn 100th anniversary celebration of the 1906 earthquake and fire. Still, I didn’t connect San Francisco’s phoenix to the one I wanted until Jason, my tattoo artist, said he’d done a number of phoenixes that year.

My phoenix is different than the others, though. Jason had already transferred his drawing of the bird onto my arm when we realized we had different interpretations of the phoenix myth. Most phoenixes in art and tattoos are shown surrounded by flames – at the end of their lives, before their resurrection.

I wanted a phoenix that had already burned itself to death and was rising again. I wanted the magic to have already occurred. Jason ended up free-handing smoke around her as she rises from the ashes.

In one foot, my phoenix holds a baby’s skull. That’s the egg from which she rises. That’s my younger brother’s skull.

I wasn’t sure how I would feel about wearing an indelible memento mori, but 10 years after the tattoo was finished, it still comforts me. I will never stop mourning my brother, but as painful as that loss was and is, it was the catalyst that finally lit a fire under me and made me stop waiting to be discovered. Fifteen years after his death, I’ve published eight books. I’m finally living the life I dreamed of, instead of waiting for it to begin.

I’d rather have my brother than a tattoo, but that doesn’t seem to be a bargain I’m capable of striking.

Borderlands at the Lit Crawl

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Join me at Borderlands Books this Saturday at 6:30 for Phase 2 of the Lit Crawl.  I’ll be reading with Sarah Gailey (River of Teeth), Sarah Kuhn (Heroine Complex), and Carter Scholz (a huge number of short stories) as part of Hippos, Heroines, and Spaceships! I’ll be representing the spaceships part of the evening.

What is a Lit Crawl?  If a pub crawl is moving from bar to bar, having a drink in each, then a Lit Crawl means moving from venue to venue, listening to a massive number of authors reading from their own works. This year’s Lit Crawl brings more than 550 performers to 103 events in the space of four hours this Saturday (10/14) night.

You can stick around the Borderlands Cafe to catch Airships, Magic, and More in Lit Crawl’s Phase 3 from 8-9 PM.  Reading will be Robyn Bennis (The Guns Above), Dana Fredsti (Spawn of Lilith), Ayize Jama-Everett (The Entropy of Bones), and Ellen Klages (Passing Strange).

Borderlands Books is at 866 Valencia Street, between 19th and 20th, in San Francisco’s Mission District.  The Borderlands Cafe is next door at 870 Valencia.

The whole Lit Crawl schedule is online at http://www.litquake.org/event-series/lit-crawl-san-francisco.

199 Cemeteries link round-up

[image error]I have a momentary breather between book events, so I wanted to collect up all the links so far for the press and guest posts I’ve been doing for 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die.

The tour kicked off in July, when I was interviewed for the Blueprint for Living show on Australia’s ABC radio. That generated 3 pieces: the audio of the radio show, an article about cemetery tourism, and a list of the best cemeteries in the world.

Tombstone Tourism:

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/blueprintforliving/tombstone-tourism/8665726

Dark Tourism: Why Would You Want to Spend Your Holiday Visiting a Cemetery?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-06/tombstone-tourism-why-we-visit-cemeteries-on-holidays/8673454

Cemetery Travel: World’s Best Destinations

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/blueprintforliving/cemetery-travel—10-of-the-worlds-best/8667452

The New York Times featured the book in their Open Book column in the Books section:

A Guide to Graveside Tourism

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/books/review/199-cemeteries-to-see-before-you-die.html

The San Francisco Chronicle also featured it in their Sunday Lit section:

Travel Books: 199 Cemeteries A Lively Chronicle of Culture

http://www.sfchronicle.com/travel/article/Travel-Books-199-Cemeteries-a-lively-12241291.php?cmpid=gsa-sfgate-result

Time magazine interviewed me for their 10/3/17 issue:

What Gets Remembered: How Visiting a Cemetery Can Teach you About History

http://time.com/4963379/cemeteries-history-rhoads/

San Francisco magazine interviewed me about Bay Area cemeteries that everyone should visit:

Just in Time for Halloween, Bay Area Cemeteries to See Before You Die

https://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/just-time-halloween-the-bay-area-cemeteries-see-you-die

I did a couple of radio interviews:

From the Bookshelf @ 23 minutes in

https://player.fm/series/gary-shapiros-from-the-bookshelf/guests-james-gleick-and-loren-rhodes

Narrative Species

Life, Death, and Everything in Between

https://narrativespecies.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/loren-rhoads-suggests-199-cemeteries-to-see-before-you-die-life-death-and-everything-in-between/

Agony Column (long version):

http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2017/2017-interviews/loren_rhoads-2017.mp3

The Agony Column (short version):

http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2017/2017-time_to_read/time_to_read_ep274_loren_rhoads.mp3

Several places did photo-heavy features, including:

Atlas Obscura:

In Search of Cemeteries Alive with Beauty, Art, and History

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cemeteries-to-visit-before-you-die-monuments

Mental Floss:

12 of the Most Beautiful Cemeteries Around the World

http://mentalfloss.com/photos/504533/12-most-beautiful-cemeteries-around-world

Did You Know:

7 Amazing Cemeteries to Visit Before You Inhabit One (if You’re into That Sort of Thing)

http://didyouknowfacts.com/8-amazing-cemeteries-visit-inhabit-one-know-youre-sort-thing/

Mind-Blowing Facts:

10 Unique Cemeteries to Visit Before You Inhabit One

https://mind-blowingfacts.com/unique-cemeteries/

The book was featured on a couple of book lists:

The Order of the Good Death’s Resource List:

http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/resources/books

Cult of Weird’s Morbid Must-Reads for Fall:

http://www.cultofweird.com/books/2017-fall-reading-list/

And some of my guest posts have started to show up.

Legacy.com

Cemetery Sights: Norton, Emperor of the United States

http://www.legacy.com/news/explore-history/article/cemetery-sights-norton-emperor-of-the-united-states

The Author Spot

Did You Know There are Travel Sites Dedicated to Cemeteries?

https://staceyturner-authorspot.blogspot.com/2017/10/did-you-know-there-are-travel-sites.html

Horror Addicts

The Most Haunted Cemetery in the World

https://horroraddicts.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/guest-blog-the-most-haunted-cemetery-in-the-world-by-loren-rhoads/

There’s more to come, including USA Today, Preservation magazine, and RealSimple.com.

Join Me at Borderlands Today

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So many good things have happened in the last week that I am having trouble keeping up with them all.  I keep thinking of things I want to blog about, but then the next shiny opportunity comes along…

The highlight for today is taking the 199 Cemeteries Roadshow to Borderlands Books in San Francisco’s Mission District.  I go way back with Borderlands:  they hosted my first-ever Morbid Curiosity reading in 1998, the year after they opened.  I worked behind the corner at the first Borderlands on Laguna Street way back in the day.  Borderlands invited me to perform at my first Litcrawl in 2005.  They hosted Morbid Curiosity‘s wake in the cafe space, long before there were walls or a ceiling.  Borderlands has always been a huge supporter of my books and of me as an author and editor.

If you can, I’d love it if you could join me this afternoon at 3 pm at the amazing Borderlands Cafe (870 Valencia Street, San Francisco). Bring your cemetery questions, your graveyard adventures, or simply hang out and support an institution that has encouraged so many writers over the years.

PS. Yes, that’s me in my skeleton gloves inside the bookstore.  I’m trying to keep my new tattoo out of the sun.

Soon…199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die

We’re about a week away from the publication of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die.  The book has already been sighted on the shelves at Christopher’s Books in San Francisco. Borderlands Bookstore has the poster in its window.  I’ve got three interviews to do this week — and I did one on Saturday.  And the book tour is about to begin…

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I’m swinging between euphoria and panic.  The book made #1 on Amazon…in the tiny category of New Literary & Religious Travel Books.  Still, I’ve never had a book in the #1 slot before.

This morning, there was an ad for the book from Barnes & Noble on the online paper I read.  I’m not exactly sure how it targeted me, but my heart skipped when I saw it.

199 Cemeteries is my 11th book. Some have been self-published or published online or published through small presses or indy presses.  The Morbid Curiosity book was published by Scribner, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster.  This is the first time I’ve seen an ad for one that I didn’t place myself.

It all seems kind of unreal, even though I’ve seen the beautifully illustrated hardcover myself. Next week, you can see it too.

If you’re anywhere in California, come say hi at one of my events.  I’m collecting suggestions for volume 2.

Behind Guardian of the Golden Gate

[image error]I’ve been writing stories about Alondra DeCourval for years and years. “Guardian of the Golden Gate,” which just appeared in the Strange California anthology, is the tenth to be published. The others have appeared in the books Best New Horror #27, Fright Mare: Women Write Horror, Sins of the Sirens, The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One, and nEvermore!: Tales of Murder, Mystery, and the Macabre, as well as in magazines from Not One of Us to New Realm.

Most of the Alondra stories have been inspired by places I’ve traveled, but “Guardian of the Golden Gate” was directly inspired by a place that I lived. When I first moved to San Francisco in 1988, I lived in a beautiful Victorian house at Divisadero and Castro. It stood in a transitional neighborhood: not the gay Mecca of the Castro, not a remnant of the African-American Lower Haight, not a vestige of the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury. The house I lived in had survived the 1906 quake, but looked out across the bay into Oakland and beyond. It gave me a sense of living in something alive and growing.

Down the hill from my house was the first Thai restaurant that I ever ate in. When Alondra eats there in the story, she chooses my favorite dish. Almost thirty years later, Phuket is still there, as is Toronado, the bar where Alondra and Clement meet for beers.

One place in the story that hasn’t survived the years is the magic shop where Alondra and Stella work. Curios and Candles was a real place, full of suncatchers and gallon jars of spell ingredients, jewelry, and handcrafts, and lots of books. Curios and Candles was a holdover from the magical days of San Francisco’s past. I’m still sad that it’s gone.

The restaurant where the story ends, All You Knead, is gone, too. A bright room filled with canvases by local artists, it survived for decades in the Upper Haight on the same block as Mendel’s Art Supply. The waitresses had the best tattoos. Like Alondra, I always ordered the black olive calzone. I could never finish it, either.

This story includes other things I love about San Francisco: riding a motorcycle in the fog, walking by the bay in the moonlight, the wildlife, the history. It draws on the darker side of life by the Bay, too. The dove that Alondra sees on the bridge came from real life. I like to walk from the Warming Hut in the Presidio across the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito for a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning. On one of those hikes, I saw a luminous white bird on the edge of the roadway across the bridge. I faced the same dilemma that Alondra does. Unfortunately, the outcome was the same. I honor the memory of that amazing, otherworldly messenger.

Clement himself was inspired by a character in a story called “Ascalon” by Seth Lindberg.  (You can read an excerpt of the story or order a copy of it here.  I recommend both.) Seth and I spent a couple of years in a writing group called The Paramental Appreciation Society. He borrowed Alondra for an urban fantasy he was writing. With his permission, I borrowed Clement for this story.

My final inspiration for “Guardian of the Golden Gate” was the documentary The Bridge, which explored the pull of the Golden Gate Bridge on people who are suicidal. I understand the call of darkness, but if you need help, please ask for it. We are here in this world for each other. You can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline anytime: 1-800-273-8255.

Wings Unseen

[image error]I met Rebecca Gomez Farrell almost a year ago, when she came to Martuni’s for the Literary Speakeasy. We read together in March when she set up the Broad Universe RFR at FogCon and again in August at the Octopus Literary Salon when her first novel came out. I had some questions – I always have questions – so I invited her to stop by my blog and chat.

Rebecca Gomez Farrell writes all the speculative fiction genres she can conjure up. An associate member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Becca’s shorter works have been published by The Future Fire, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Pulp Literature, among other outlets. Her first fantasy novel, Wings Unseen, debuted in August 2017 from Meerkat Press. This year, you can also find several of her short stories in new anthologies: Little Letters on the Skin, Through a Scanner Farkly, and Dark, Luminous Wings (October 2017).

Becca’s food, drink, and travel blog theGourmez.com has garnered multiple accolades. It influences every tasty bite of her fictional world-building. She lives in Oakland, CA, with her tech wizard husband and two trickster cats. Her fiction website is RebeccaGomezFarrell.com. On social media, she’s @theGourmez.

Loren Rhoads: Did something in the real world inspire your book?

Rebecca Gomez Farrell: Does my lifelong desire for a career in fiction writing count as real world inspiration? Joking, joking! My inspirations for the book don’t come from the real world so much as wanting to play with different concepts and going from there. For example, I wrote the book’s beginning relationship between Janto and Serra as overly romantic, as though they’d stepped right out from the pages of a bodice ripper with exaggerated proclamations of love and devotion. I purposely wanted to set them up in readers’ minds as a couple with deep affection for each other…but perhaps not as mature of a relationship as they believe themselves to have. That early scene places their tender love in juxtaposition to the news of Serra’s brother’s murder and her rising emotions of grief and anger. Can it weather such adult tragedy?

I guess you can say romance novels are one real-world inspiration. So is a hatred of mosquitos, social disparity, and the patriarchy.

LR: What is your favorite scene in the book — and why?

RGF: With the caveat that I can never pick a favorite anything without soon changing my mind, I’m picking a scene from Vesperi’s point of view at the very peak of the book’s climax. Which means I’m not going to tell you much about what happens, but I will share why I love it. It’s a final test for Vesperi, a moment of “what if?” for the reader. What if her character journey has been all for naught? What if, in Chapter 57, she’s really the same person she started as in Chapter 1? It’s a scene that makes clear my own thoughts on a fatal flaw within a patriarchal system: underestimating the value of women. Plus, Janto gets a really cool line.

LR: What was your writing process like as you wrote Wings Unseen?

RGF: It was a long and twisted road…by which I mean I began thinking about the book in college, which was fifteen years ago! The first few chapters—the introductions to my three main characters—were clear to me right away. I wrote those out in 2007, if my file properties can be believed. As I wrote, more scenes jumped to mind, so I noted the basics of a scene and filed it away for later, when I needed a prompt to begin. Writing the book in earnest started in 2009. By 2013, it was ready for submission after a third draft and a round of beta readers. I am not a fast writer, needless to say!

I organized my plotting as I went along, coming up with a character tree, glossary, and map as my memory demanded them, and ironing out the timeline after finishing my first draft. But my character arcs and my basic concepts were clear from the get-go. The puzzle of drafting came from figuring out how to fit them all together.

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Becca, Dan Potter, and me at the Octopus Literary Salon in August 2017

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

RGF: For me, it is hearing genuine reports from friends and family that they loved it and couldn’t put it down. What a compliment! But I do also appreciate the opportunities to read my work for a crowd. It feeds into my enjoyment of performance in childhood. I dare say I’m a better authorial reader than I ever was an actress, singer, or director!

LR: What do you have planned next?

RGF: After several successful local Bay Area events to promote Wings Unseen over the last couple of weeks, I am going on a book tour to Los Angeles and the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina! I look forward to seeing all my connections in those areas and reading with a great slate of fellow authors. I will also be attending SirensCon in late October and possibly ConVolution soon.

Oh, did you mean writing projects? Well, I’m working on the second draft of a post-apocalyptic romance novel called Natural Disasters. After that, I will turn my attention to a Wings Unseen sequel. In short stories, my fantasy fable “Treasure” will appear in October in the Dark Luminous Wings anthology. I had a humorous science fiction tale and poetic flash horror story released this past summer as well. I am always working on new short stories.

Wings Unseen:

[image error]To end a civil war, Lansera’s King Turyn relinquished a quarter of his kingdom to create Medua, exiling all who would honor greed over valor to this new realm on the other side of the mountains. The Meduans and Lanserim have maintained an uneasy truce for two generations, but their ways of life are as compatible as oil and water.

When Vesperi, a Meduan noblewoman, kills a Lanserim spy with a lick of her silver flame, she hopes the powerful display of magic will convince her father to name her as his heir. She doesn’t know the act will draw the eye of the tyrannical Guj, Medua’s leader, or that the spy was the brother of Serrafina Gavenstone, the fiancèe of Turyn’s grandson, Prince Janto. As Janto sets out for an annual competition on the mysterious island of Braven, Serra accepts an invitation to study with the religious Brotherhood, hoping for somewhere to grieve her brother’s murder in peace. What she finds instead is a horror that threatens both countries, devouring all living things and leaving husks of skin in its wake.

To defeat it, Janto and Serra must learn to work together with the only person who possesses the magic that can: the bedeviling Vesperi, whom no one knows murdered Serra’s brother. An ultimate rejection plunges Vesperi forward toward their shared destiny, with the powerful Guj on her heels and the menacing beating of unseen wings all about.

Links:

Publisher’s Page on Wings Unseen: http://meerkatpress.com/books/wings-unseen/
Amazon buy link: http://amzn.to/2x25GBc