Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 41

You must write

I’m hosting another Nanowrimo write-in at Borderlands Cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District tomorrow night, from 6-8.  It’s free, but the cafe would appreciate if you’d buy a cup of coffee or something to help keep the lights on.

If you can’t be there in person, please join us virtually.  Comment below or ping me on Facebook or Twitter and let me know you are writing.  I’ll be with you in spirit.

You do not have to be signed up for Nanowrimo, although I encourage you to do so.  It’s amazing to feel part of a community of people making shit up and shaping reality and pounding out the words.

At times like these, when the surface of reality is shifting beneath our feet, it is more important than ever to write.  Tell YOUR story. Spill out your fear and frustration.  Or:  make something up and create a place to escape. It doesn’t matter what you write, only that you do.

Every word that you write will heal you a little more.  If you’re lucky, you may also heal someone else.

Do You Nanowrimo?

Nanowrimo Merit Badges, the best donor gift ever!

In August 2003, my pregnancy turned complicated. The long hours confined to a hospital bed, where I faced the realization that one of us might not survive my daughter’s birth, fired my determination to write something – finish something, publish something – before I died.

Luckily, my daughter and I both pulled through. I did my first Nanowrimo that November, when my colicky preemie was two months old. Not surprisingly, I crashed and burned before the month was out. I wasn’t getting much sleep and could barely rub two thoughts together, but it didn’t matter. Any work I did was work that hadn’t existed before. I took pride in getting anything done at all.

I worked on that book, The Dangerous Type, on and off for years. I also kept attempting Nanowrimo. Some years I won, but most years I didn’t. In the meantime, I found an agent, who sold a collection of essays I’d edited to Scribner. When I finally finished The Dangerous Type, I showed it to my agent. She wasn’t interested in dark space opera. It didn’t matter. I loved the characters and wanted to play more in their galaxy. I used the 2012 Nanowrimo to write a sequel.

In 2013, I told a local small press editor about my space operas. He’d just started working for a bigger house in Manhattan. He asked to see The Dangerous Type. Two weeks later, he asked to see the Nanowrimo draft of the sequel. Then he asked if I could put together an outline for a third book. He’d told the publisher they should offer me a three-book deal.

I began writing that third book in February 2015. Using skills I’d learned during all my Nanowrimos – breaking the work down into a daily word count, hacking away at that word count every spare moment, writing in a notebook in bed before I turned the light out, typing that hand-scrawled material in first thing in the morning, plotting during long walks in the sunshine, writing in the car before I picked my daughter up from school, plowing ahead no matter what – I turned in the final, polished draft of the book five months later.

All three books – The Dangerous Type, Kill By Numbers, and No More Heroes – were published by Night Shade Books in 2015. All three of them contain an author photo taken by Ken Goudey at the Night of Writing Dangerously (the Nanowrimo fundraiser) in 2012.

I am so indebted to Nanowrimo. Thirteen years ago, I was a wannabe novelist who’d published short stories and essays, but hadn’t completed a longer work. Now I have four novels and a collection of my own essays out on a variety of presses – all of them honed by participating in the National Novel Writing Month.

What can you accomplish?

If you’re in San Francisco, I’ll be hosting a Nanowrimo write-in once again on every Friday night in November from 6-8 at Borderlands Cafe on San Francisco’s Valencia Street.  The write-ins are free, except for the price of your beverage from the cafe.  Come get some work done in the presence of other authors.

Feel free to make me a buddy on the Nanowrimo site, too. I’m MorbidLoren.

October’s Morbid Roundup

Chris Hsiang took the best picture of me performing ever. Thanks, Chris!

The Martini Bar of Horror was my last performance for the year, so I’m glad it went well.  I was nervous about telling a story I hadn’t told in public before, but it felt like it went pretty well.  Next time I tell it live, I will nail it.

The Strange California book reached its funding on Kickstarter finally, so I’ll let you know when the book will be available.  It’s going to be a monster, absolutely huge.

I have been sitting on a really exciting announcement for about a month now, but hopefully I’ll get the contract very soon.  I cannot wait to dive into this new project!

In the meantime, I’ve been guest-posting all over everywhere in the last couple months, so here’s the collection of links:

Alison J. McKenzie asked me to talk about the best holiday of the year: https://alisonjmckenzie.wordpress.com/2016/10/30/the-best-holiday-of-the-year-guest-post-by-loren-rhoads/

Mental Floss invited me to suggest 8 of the Most Fascinating Cemeteries You Can Visit: http://cms.mentalfloss.com/article/87542/8-most-fascinating-cemeteries-you-can-visit

Search magazine asked me to write about the columbariums of the Bay Area: https://searchmagazinenet.wordpress.com/2016/10/29/search-honoring-the-dead/

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I raved about my favorite cemetery books on Kira Butler’s blog: http://www.kirabutler.com/top-ten-cemetery-history-books/

 

I mused on the novel and original Exorcist movie and how they led to the Lost Angels novel: http://horror.org/halloween-haunts-exorcism-fun-profit-loren-rhoads/

Finally:  there’s one more day to enter to win a copy of my book of cemetery travel essays, Wish You Were Here, on my Cemetery Travel blog: https://cemeterytravel.com/2016/10/24/win-a-copy-of-wish-you-were-here/

 

Martini Bar of Horrors

Tomorrow night (Thursday, October 27) the Martini Bar of Horrors will open in San Francisco. Six Bay Area writers will be serving up macabre tales for the evening, including the wonderful Loren Rhoads! Loren was the editor of Morbid Curiosity magazine and The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two. She’s working on a book about the 200 Cemeteries You Should See Before You Die. She also lives in a haunted house in San Francisco’s Excelsior district. Come out and see Loren and the rest of our amazing authors!


Here’s the whole invitation:





























Welcome to the Martini Bar of Horrors! Five Bay Area writers and storytellers will be serving up a deadly combination of martinis, terror, and spine-tingling tales. Your macabre performers for the evening will include S.G. Browne, Dana Fredsti, Sunil Patel, Loren Rhoads, and Alia Volz. Your host and curator each and every month is James J. Siegel.

As always, Literary Speakeasy is a FREE event with NO drink minimum. And everyone in attendance will receive a FREE raffle ticket for their chance to win the evening’s secret speakeasy prize. So please join our amazing performers and we promise to leave you with an evening filled with nightmares.

Performer bios:

S.G. Browne is the author of five novels, including Less Than Hero, Big Egos, Lucky Bastard, Fated, and Breathers, as well as the short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel and the heartwarming holiday novella I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus. He’s an ice cream connoisseur, Guinness aficionado, cat enthusiast, and a sucker for It’s a Wonderful Life. You can learn more about his writing at www.sgbrowne.com. You can also follow him on Facebook at Facebook.com/SGBrowneAuthor or on Twitter at @s_g_browne.

Dana Fredsti is an ex B-movie actress with a background in theatrical combat (a skill she utilized in Army of Darkness as a sword-fighting Deadite and fight captain). Through seven plus years of volunteering at EFBC/FCC, Dana’s been kissed by tigers, and had her thumb sucked by an ocelot with nursing issues. She’s addicted to bad movies and any book or film, good or bad, which include zombies. She’s the author of the Ashley Parker series, touted as Buffy meets the Walking Dead, and the zombie noir novella, A Man’s Gotta Eat What a Man’s Gotta Eat.

Sunil Patel is a Bay Area fiction writer and playwright who has written about everything from ghostly cows to talking beer. His plays have been performed at San Francisco Theater Pub and San Francisco Olympians Festival, and his fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, among others. His favorite things to consume include nachos, milkshakes, and narrative. Find out more at ghostwritingcow.com.

Loren Rhoads was the editor of Morbid Curiosity magazine and The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two. She’s working on a book about the 200 Cemeteries You Should See Before You Die. She lives in a haunted house in San Francisco’s Excelsior district.

Alia Volz is a daughter of this town. Her writings appear in Tin House, the New York Times, Threepenny Review, Utne Reader, New Enlgand Review, The Normal School, Barrelhouse’s 2016 anthology Dig If You Will The Picture: Remembering Prince, and elsewhere. She recently completed her first novel, a mean little cowboy noir in which all of your favorite characters die.

James J. Siegel is the author of the poetry collection “How Ghosts Travel,” published earlier this year by Spuyten Duyvil Press. He is also the host and curator of the monthly Literary Speakeasy at Martuni’s Piano Bar in San Francisco, which brings together poets, writers, and musicians for a night of performance and martinis. His work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Assaracus, The Cortland Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men On Their Muses.

Why (And How) Writers Write

Last month, SG Browne, Dana Fredsti, and I chatted at the Borderlands Cafe about why writers do what they do.  The event was organized by Scott as a way to encourage more writers to join the San Francisco Writers Coffeehouse, which meets at the cafe on the fourth Sunday of each month.  They’re meeting today from 5 pm until 6 or whenever it breaks up.

Before we did our panel, Scott sent around some questions to consider.  Because I’m OCD, I went ahead and wrote my answers down.  Here they are, in interview form.

What made you want to become a writer?

Star Wars. I wrote stories before that, but Star Wars set me on fire. I wanted to write stories that made me feel like Luke watching the sunset on Tattooine.

What drives you to write?

I write to make sense of the world. I can’t stop. I think writing is a kind of magic. It’s taking an image in my head and transferring it to a reader’s head. That’s is really cool – and such an honor.

Has what motivated you to write initially changed over the years?

No. I still write for myself, then look for a publisher.

How do you go about your writing process?

I write everything longhand, then type it it. That helps me edit as I go. Also, I generally write out of order. I really like the puzzle-piecing part of assembling a book, when I make sense of everything and fit it all together. I spend a lot of time writing in cafes. It’s easier for me to concentrate with background noise and people moving around. I especially like Shut Up and Write, which is a Meet-Up for writers that meets all over the Bay Area. Sitting with them is always very inspiring.

What is the easiest and/or hardest part of writing?

The easiest part is slapping words down. The hardest part is waiting to hear back about submissions. The total lack of control over that process still frustrates me.

How do you balance your live/work life when it comes to writing?

I have a kid, so I have to deal with the real world on a daily basis. I’m the work-at-home parent, so I cope with deliveries and house repair and food and pets. In return, I get an absolutely silent house during the school year. My husband is a musician, so I cover for him when he’s rehearsing or playing out. Both doing creative works balances out the time between us.

What drove you to write what you write?

I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, but nonfiction is easier to place. I sort of stumbled into the cemetery stuff, but I’m on a mission now.

The science fiction was an old love. I just kept submitting things to Night Shade until they finally bought something.

I write the urban fantasy because I love the old occult detective stories – and I want to write about the places I travel.

What resources aid you in your writing that you would recommend to other writers?

I love Nanowrimo (the National Novel Writing Month). It teaches you skills in how to move forward on a project, how to keep going when you’re lost, how to figure things out along the way. There’s a lot to be said for knowing that thousands of other people are suffering alongside you, trying to create something out of mere thoughts. Whether you complete a novel in a month or not, it’s extremely valuable to learn how to get the work done.

What advice would you give to someone who is just starting down the writing path?

Ask for help and be prepared to accept it. The writers who get work – and get asked back – are the ones who are flexible and willing to listen to an editor or a publisher. If you freak out every time an editor moves a comma, you are not going to have a good time as a writer. There is always more to learn. It’s best to be open to teachers: especially the ones who want to pay you.

How to celebrate an author’s birthday

Imagine you’re writing a book.  You labor over it alone in your room (or alone at a table in a cafe, as the case may be).  You show it to 2 or 3 people, but mostly it exists in your head.

Then you send it to a publisher.  They like it, buy it, publish it.  It goes out into the world.

Then you wait.  You’re dying to know what people think, good and bad.  Of course you hope everyone will adore your book, but you don’t really expect that.  You intentionally wrote a book that is challenging, provoking, prickly. You wrote about bad people doing bad things, and bad people doing good things, and how the line shifts, depending on the point of view in the story.

So…  Today is my birthday! The only gift I really want is for you to review of one of my books.

Whether you go to Goodreads or Librarything  — or you go to Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com or Audible — or you write something for your blog or Facebook or Twitter: it would mean a lot to me.

I understand that I can do every reading gig I’m offered.  I can guest post on every blog I find. All the same, I know what really sells books is when someone tells a friend, “Hey, I read this thing…”

So if you read something of mine, would you tell someone?

What if you read one of my books and didn’t like it? That’s entirely okay.  Tell me what you didn’t like. I’m a big girl.  I can handle criticism.  Besides, how am I going to make the next book more like the things you like?

Any review — whether you leave stars or you write down your thoughts — is going to mean a lot to me.  Just be honest and say what you really think.

We’ll still be friends afterward. Pinky swear.

The Autumn People

 

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My birthday is kind of a holy day for me. I try to take it off, spend it in a graveyard if at all possible. I’ve celebrated my birthday in Pere Lachaise, in the Bone Chapel of Kutna Hora, and in Colma’s many graveyards. Like the poet said, “Any day above ground is a good one.” If there’s sunshine and green grass, birdsong and statuary, or trees and flowers and poetry involved, so much the better.

In 2012, I spent the morning of my birthday poking around Westwood Village Memorial Park near UCLA. (I featured it as a Cemetery of the Week.) I’d been to the cemetery once before, in the winter as night was falling, when it grew too dark to photograph anything, let alone find anyone other than Marilyn Monroe. I still had a wonderful time, sitting on a bench under a huge, spreading tree, listening to the night settle down in the big city.

I wanted to visit Westwood in the daytime, to see if I could find that same sense of peace. Better than that, I found the grave of Ray Bradbury.

Ray Bradbury is my literary hero. I’ve read his books to pieces. I’ve underlined and analyzed and memorized his writing. I had the opportunity to meet him only once. I was so tongue-tied I could barely tell him how much his work meant to me. Luckily, I think I was more eloquent as I stood over his grave, despite the tears in my eyes.

“For these beings, fall is ever the normal season,” he wrote in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the first of his books I read. “Where do they come from?” he asked. “The dust. Where do they go? The grave.”

It’s like he knew me. In the book, the autumn people are the bad guys, but I am an autumn person. I am headed to the grave, spiraling closer one year at a time, but every day in the open air is a blessing and a gift. It’s been a joy to have Ray Bradbury’s stories as company along the way.

I’m glad I finally got to tell him that.

The Morbid Mid-Point

Not surprisingly, October is always my busiest month. October is when people’s thoughts turn to graveyards… well, other people’s thoughts, anyway.  You know how I am.

The first of my new cemetery columns appeared on Gothic Beauty this week.  I chose to write about one of my favorite cemeteries in the world:  London’s lovely Highgate.  My family visited this summer, as a thunderstorm rolled in.  You can check out the story here: http://www.gothicbeauty.com/2016/10/in-glorious-highgate-cemetery/

The Library of the Damned interviewed me about the scariest thing I’ve ever read and what terrifies me in real life: http://libraryofthedamned.com/2016/10/14/31-days-of-halloween-with-loren-rhoads/

Even though Litquake rejected my proposed reading this year, I got quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle about what a great thing Litquake is.  It’s all true:  the vampires, the porn, the feeling like a rockstar:  http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Litquake-makes-writers-feel-like-rock-stars-9773132.php

Finally, the Strange California anthology is still raising funds on Kickstarter:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jasonbatt/strange-california-a-speculative-fiction-anthology

 

Death’s Garden Revisited

So I’m going to start wrapping up the series of guest posts on my cemetery blog.  Want to tell me about the graveyard that changed your life?  Now is your chance.

Here’s the call for submissions:

Twenty years ago, I was given a box of miscellaneous cemetery photos. They had been taken by my best friend’s husband over the course of his travels around the Americas. Blair was 28 years old and dying of AIDS. He wanted to know his photos had a good home.

I decided to put together a book that would feature those photos. Initially, I was going to write all the text, but as I talked to people about the project, everyone seemed to have a cemetery story to tell.

The book title expanded from Death’s Gardento Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries. I was thrilled to discover that people I knew — even complete strangers — all had a graveyard they’d connected with, either because a family member was buried there, or because they’d visited it on vacation, or because they’d grown up in a house near it, or for a whole bouquet of other reasons.

The contributors varied from people I met through zine publishing to a ceramics professor at Ohio State University, writers for the LA Weekly, professional artists and photographers, underground musicians, depressed high school girls, and punk rock diva Lydia Lunch. As the book came together, Death’s Garden blew away my expectations.

The initial print run of 1000 copies sold out 18 months after my husband and I put it together for our publishing company. I’d only asked for one-time rights to use everyone’s contributions, so I couldn’t republish it. Once it was gone, it was gone.

As the years passed, I’ve lost track of many of the contributors. Some are dead and have a different relationship with cemeteries altogether now. Others have sunk into the anonymity of a pseudonym on the internet.

For a while now I’ve wanted to assemble a second volume of Death’s Garden.  I think there are a lot more stories to be told about relationships people have formed with graveyards. For instance, what’s it like to be a tour guide? How are cemetery weddings different than others? What’s the strangest cemetery you’ve ever visited, or the most beautiful, or the spookiest?

Eventually, I’d like to put these new essays into a physical book, but for now, I’d like to kick off a new feature on Cemetery Travel. This feature is open to anyone who has ever visited a cemetery where something special happened, either good or bad.  Tell me about your relationship with a cemetery.  I’d like to publish it on CemeteryTravel.com.

What I’m looking for:

personal essays that focus on a single cemetery
preferably with pictures
under 1500 words (totally negotiable, but the limit is something to shoot for)
descriptive writing
characterization, dialogue, tension: all the tools you’d use to tell a story
but this MUST be true — and it must have happened to you!

Reprints are accepted.  If you’ve written something lovely on your blog and wouldn’t mind it reaching the couple thousand people who subscribe to Cemetery Travel, let me know.

If I accept your essay for publication on Cemetery Travel, be warned: I may do some light editing, with your permission.

Also, I’ll need:

a bio of 50-100 words
a photo of you
a link to your blog or book
links to your social media sites, so people can follow you.

Finally, if — as I hope — this project progresses to becoming a legitimate book, I will contact you with a contract and offer of payment.  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, here are some links to the original Death’s Garden:

My introduction to the first book
the list of contributors
Excerpts from some of the essays from the first book

Reviews of the original Death’s Garden:

“This impressive book is so striking that, upon opening its binding, one is hard pressed not to be moved by its contents. With every perusal, the reader finds another thing to think about.” — Carpe Noctem

“Death’s Garden is an anthology of cemetery tours from all around the world, well-photographed, and smart enough to know it’s not the where and when of certain burial grounds that intrigues us, it’s the why as well. There’s a certain joy about Death’s Gardenwhich is hard to pin down; the sense that just as no two graveyards are the same, no two burial beliefs are the same, either.” — Alternative Press

“The photographers and writers relay their thoughts on the relationship between the living and the dead, creating a feast for the eyes and senses. Death’s Garden goes a long way in showing just what these residences of the dead have to offer to those of us that are still among the living.” — Maximum Rock N Roll

Audible is having a sale

If you’ve been wanting to check out audiobooks, Audible is having a 50%-off sale on SF & Fantasy.

Now’s your chance to listen to The Dangerous Type!  You can check out a sample of the book here: http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/The-Dangerous-Type-Audiobook/B01554G02M

In fact, you can get the whole trilogy on sale.

Kill by Numbers is here: http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Kill-by-Numbers-Audiobook/B0170OJ06S/

No More Heroes is here: http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/No-More-Heroes-Audiobook/B01A01PHRO

All three are half or more off — and my narrator Liv Anderson is really terrific.  Check out the samples and treat yourself to hours of kickass women fighting for humanity all across the galaxy.