Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 4

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.

Going to BayCon 2024

I hadn’t expected to attend BayCon this year, but they’ve scheduled me for a couple of panels, so I’ve got to go!  Look at these goodies:

#CemeteryLife
6 Jul 2024, Saturday 14:45 – 16:00, Salon 8

#CemeteryLife: Let’s talk cemeteries. What has been, what is, and what will be the way we bury, mourn, and remember? Join authors Emerian Rich and Loren Rhoads as we share our experiences, talk about our favorites, and discuss what it’s like exploring, writing about, and working in cemeteries. Bring your cemetery questions. Is there anything you always wondered? Ask away without judgement!

This should be lots of fun. Emerian worked at a group of historic cemeteries and you know I have lots to say on the subject.

HorrorAddicts.net Panel/Party
6 Jul 2024, Saturday 17:45 – 19:00, Sierra

Come geek out with us horror-style! Let’s discuss horror and listen to some horror readings. Panelists include moderator Emerian Rich (the hostess of the Horror Addicts podcast), Laurel Anne Hill, Loren Rhoads, and R. L. Merrill.

I think I’m in the mood to read my bird flu epidemic story, set in Golden Gate Park. There may be giveaways, too.

BayCon is being held from July 4-7 at the Santa Clara Marriott, 2700 Mission College Boulevard, Santa Clara, California 95054.

Get your tickets here!

Canceling my cemetery book sale this weekend

I’ve waffled back and forth for several days, but this morning I decided NOT to vend at the Mystique in Midsummer event in the historic City Cemetery in Sacramento this weekend.

The weather report is calling for 105 on Saturday. I’m not used to that kind of heat at the best of times — our high temperatures in San Francisco hover around 70 in the summer — but I’m on a med that makes me really sensitive to the heat. It’s just not safe for me to spend 8 or 9 hours outside in that.

I am deeply disappointed. I was so looking forward to seeing my Sacramento friends and showing off my sample copy of 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die. We’ll have to do it some other time.

As far as I know at this moment, the event is still going on. Here’s the images I have for it:

 

Get more information at the Facebook page.

In the meantime, I am stocked up on Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, the Cemetery Travels Notebook, Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: True Tales of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual, This Morbid Life, and the last few copies of the black edition of 199 Cemeteries To See Before You Die. I would love to sell you something to read!

Deirdre Swinden’s Somnium

Author Deirdre Swinden stops by my blog to tell us about the inspiration for her new novel.

Wandering while Dreaming: Confessions of a Childhood Sleepwalker

By Deirdre Swinden

When I was a child, I had a memorable stint of two or three weeks where I was caught sleepwalking. Trapped somewhere between dreams and waking, my young body would head off on the adventures of my drowsy mind. At first, no one really noticed. I would wake myself up at some point during my wanderings and head back to bed. When I woke again, I had little memory of my nighttime antics.

One morning, my mother came downstairs to find our dog, Charlie, lounging on the deck in front of the closed screen door. Fortunately, it was summer and we had a fence, so Charlie was about as happy as she could be—but my mother was obviously concerned. When I joined her for breakfast and she mentioned the mystery, I had a vague memory of coming downstairs to let Charlie out.

One embarrassing night, I completely missed not one but two bathrooms, and headed into my parents’ closet to do my business in the hamper. Another night, I woke in the back seat of my father’s car, certain we were supposed to be going somewhere. In the hope it might help, my mother closed my bedroom door each night. Soon after, the barrier was enough to stop my wanderings.

Instead I experienced something much more sinister: sleep paralysis. In these dreams, my mind was conscious, but my body could not move. I woke often with the feeling that I was not alone in my room, or that someone—or something—lingered close by.

Such dreams are not uncommon. According to a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, the “prevalence of sleep paralysis in the overall population is estimated to be around 7.6 percent” and “to date, there is no direct treatment strategy” for the condition. The dreams may be triggered for a variety of reasons, including anxiety and other mental health issues.

In my novel Somnium, Gillian Hardie suffers from extreme anxiety. When she is triggered by a piece of technology, she is certain to have a nightmare—and unlike most people, Gillian’s nightmares can kill. To survive, she’s mastered the art of lucid dreaming, but when an accident traps her in the nightmare realm, she will need a few new tricks to live through the night.

Have you ever walked in your sleep or suffered from sleep paralysis? Share your story below!

Description:

Immerse yourself in a terrifying blend of psychological horror and high-tech science fiction in this riveting novel where dreams can kill. Gillian Hardie experiences nightmares so intense they threaten her very existence, thanks to a glitch in Somnium Corporation’s groundbreaking dream advertising technology. Every night, her sleep unleashes monsters that her body reacts to as if they were real, pushing her to the edge of despair.

Armed with her lucid dreaming skills, Gillian battles these horrors, but when an accident traps her in a perpetual dream state, she must rely on Nathan Keller, a nightmare warrior, and Dex Cooper, an Operator, to navigate this nightmarish reality. With her darkest fears manifesting like never before, Gillian faces a race against time to survive a threat that could unleash unimaginable horrors from the depths of her mind.

Get your copy here!

Trigger Warnings:

This novel includes a brief depiction of sexual violence, gore, and nightmare imagery.

Author Bio:

A successful writer/editor in the corporate world for more than two decades, Deirdre Swinden is currently living and writing in North Carolina. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University and has published short stories in Griffel Literary Magazine and Grim & Gilded. Early in her writing career, she won the Popular Short Story Contest at the 2000 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference with her short work, “Shooting Televisions.”

Learn more about Deirdre’s work:

Website – https://deirdreswindenauthor.com

X/Twitter – @DeirdreSwinden

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/deirdre.swinden5

Sleep Paralysis Reference:

Farooq, M., & Anjum, F. (2023, September 4). Sleep paralysis. StatPearls – NCBI Bookshelf.

Going to StokerCon

This weekend — May 30-June 2, 2024 — is the Horror Writers Association’s StokerCon down in San Diego, California.

I’m planning to spend most of the convention in the dealers room this year. I’m sharing the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter’s table with Francesca Maria, L.S. Johnson, and Roh Morgon. I’m bringing my cemetery books, so now’s the time to fill in your collection.

On Saturday morning at 9 am, I’m on a panel called Stranger than Fiction about creating compelling nonfiction. Sadie Hartman will be moderating. My fellow panelists include Andy Boyle, Sarah Faxon, and Anne Heyward. I’m really looking forward to it.

The convention will be held at the Marriott Mission Valley at 8757 Rio San Diego Drive in San Diego, California. The dealers room will be open to the public Friday and Saturday from 9 to 6.

Still Wish You Were Here update

Sometimes I come back to my blog and have to shake my head at the naive optimism I find there. Last time I posted, I was working along on my next book of cemetery essays, Still Wish You Were Here. I expected to get it out in time for StokerCon, which is at the end of this month.

Oh, sweet summer child…

Since that post, I have made great strides in finishing the book. I’ve also spent 10 days in Michigan, looking after my mom. Last weekend, my family + two cats moved into a temporary apartment (I’m thinking of it as living in exile) while the ground floor of our house is demolished and rebuilt to make it more earthquake safe. I’ve also signed up for a study at the University of California in San Francisco because I’ve been taking care of everyone for so long that I neglected my own health. Apparently, I can’t keep burning the candle at both ends. Who knew?

So… Still Wish You Were Here is not going to be ready in time for StokerCon. I am (desperately) hoping that I will have the finished books by the Mystique in Midsummer sale at the Sacramento Historic Cemetery late in June.

In the meantime, I have two essays I haven’t touched yet, three essays written but not assembled, five essays done that need to be proofed, and the introduction to finish writing. There’s also all the fiddly stuff, like the bibliography and previous publication data, that needs to be collected and entered and formatted and proofed. The photos to collect up and scan. The thanks to write…

Then sometime this month, I need to write and record a speech for the Association for Gravestone Studies conference while getting myself prepared to attend StokerCon.

It’s all doable and I am just the person to do it. I just have to remember to exercise and get some sunshine and optimize for sleep, so I don’t hurt myself in the process.

Being human is such a challenge sometimes.

Still Wish You Were Here

Since I turned in the final changes on 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die in November, I’ve been working on finishing another cemetery memoir. Like Wish You Were Here before it, this book will collect a bunch of my previously published cemetery travel essays. I’m also writing a whole bunch more new pieces for the book.

Still Wish You Were Here covers more time than the first book: three and a half decades. It starts with exploring the garden cemetery in Ann Arbor, before I moved to California, and ends with buying my dad’s headstone last year. Along the way, I visit the California Gold Country, the Bone Chapel of Kutna Hora, the Gate to Hell in Kyoto, the Kiss of Death in Barcelona, and the city-sized graveyard of Pompeii, and so much more.

In all, Still Wish You Were Here contains 35 cemetery travel essays, which visit more than 50 cemeteries, churchyards, and gravesites around the world.

I’m more than halfway done with the book, which I’m still hoping to have out in time to take to StokerCon at the end of May. It’s going to be a headlong rush to get done in time, but I’m excited about the challenge. Wish me luck!

 

Cemetery book clubs

I love that there are so many book clubs reading cemetery books these days!

This week, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting of the Tombs & Tomes Book Club, hosted by the Congressional Cemetery. They’d read Peter Ross’s Tomb with a View, a book I really enjoyed. They liked it less than I do, but their comments were really fascinating. They gave me lots of food for thought. I look forward to sitting in on another of their meetings sometime soon. They meet both in person at the cemetery and online. You can find out more here.

Talk Death has an online book club that’s brand new. I haven’t had an opportunity to join them yet, but I’m looking forward to it. You can find out more about what they’re reading here.

The venerable book club of the Association for Gravestone Studies is meeting next weekend. They are reading my book Death’s Garden Revisited. After the discussion, I’ll join them for the final half hour to answer questions and talk about the upcoming publication of 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die. I’m really excited about it.

Do you know of other cemetery or death positive book clubs I should check out?

I created a Reader’s Guide for Death’s Garden Revisited that anyone can download. It’s got questions for reflection, a playlist of cemetery songs, and a bingo game to be played while exploring the cemetery. Please treat yourself to a copy here.

Tucson Festival of Books

Next weekend, March 9 and 10, you’ll be able to pick up some of my books at the Tucson Festival of Books. Whether your taste runs to dark fantasy, space opera, or the full spectrum of horror, I’ve got a book for you.

My books will be joining Angel Leigh McCoy, E. S. Magill, Marsha DeFilippo, and Yvonne Navarro at the Wily Writers table, #232. They’ve kindly offered to handle the sales for me.

Just a hint at what’s ahead of you:

Email subscribers: Click through if you don’t see the poster.

Thanks so much to Angel for designing this lovely poster for me! Wish I could join you in Tucson.