Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 46

This Week in Morbidland

A handful of my guest posts/interviews have been going up lately, so it’s time to do another link roundup.

I was really excited about writing about the Presger gun from Ann Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy for SF Signal’s Mind Meld about our favorite weapons:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2016/05/mind-meld-our-favorite-weapons-in-science-fiction-and-fantasy/

Unfortunately, SF Signal closed up shop the next day, so seeing the piece published is definitely bittersweet now.

Coreena Burnie interviewed me on her blog about Lost Angels and writing:

http://coreenamcburnie.com/2016/05/02/author-interview-loren-rhoads/

Margaret L. Carter interviewed me for her newsletter, which you can subscribe to here:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/margaretlcartersnewsfromthecrypt  We talked about the Haunted Mansion Retreats, Dracula, Lost Angels, and naps.

Oh, and the paperback of Fright Mare: Women Write Horror arrived in the mail!

Upcoming stuff I’m excited about:

I sold an Alondra story to New Realm magazine. It should be published soon. The story is called “The Fatal Book.”  It was written for a Flint Area Writers’ reading at Borders Books in Flint, Michigan.

I’ll be reading at the Borderlands Books’ Sponsors Open Mic on May 20 at 7 pm.  The reading will be in the back of the Borderlands Cafe, 870 Valencia Street, San Francisco.

Shortly after that, I’m off to my first WisCon.  I’m participating in the Broad Universe reading on Saturday, and taking part in two panels.  One is about writing cross-genre fiction and the other is about death.

I’ve pitches under consideration for WorldCon, Convolution, and San Francisco’s LitCrawl, so fingers crossed that some of those work out.  I’ll be at all of them anyway, but it will be more fun if I can read.

 

Another book I just adored

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh, this book was so much fun! The narrator’s voice is perfect and I fell in love with him in the first fight against a hitchhiking ghost. He’s the right balance of determined lone wolf and lonely teenager, cracking wise and wishing he was old enough and strong enough and smart enough to kill the thing that ate his father.

I plowed through the book at lightning speed. It reads really fast, never lost my interest, and even though it danced along the edge of predicability, it threw in some gruesome surprises.

I give it the five star for book design, too. Not only is the cover lovely, the interior text is printed in the color of dried blood. It’s the attention to detail that puts this over the top.

I’m so excited to discover there’s a second book in the series. Soon it shall be mine!

Get your own copy of Anna Dressed in Blood from Amazon.

View all my reviews on Goodreads.

A little bit morbid

Claud & Jim, the first two purchasers of The Dangerous Type. At Borderlands in July 2015.

Tonight I’ve been invited to meet with the Science Fiction Book Club at Borderlands Books.  They’ve read The Dangerous Type and we’re going to discuss it.  I am terrified.  What if they don’t like it?  What if they’re mean to me?  I know it’s a violent book full of prickly characters — what if they expect me to live up to that?

I’m hoping I’ll know some of the book club members, so that this will be less intimidating once I get there.  I really am curious to hear what the book made them think — and to measure those thoughts against my intentions.

As my dear friend Claud says, “What doesn’t kill me drives me mad.”

A quick wrap-up of the trouble I’ve been into:

Eric from Deviant Worlds interviewed me about space operas and succubi: http://deviantworlds.blogspot.com/2016/04/interview-loren-rhoads.html

My most popular post of late was about my quest to get 100 rejection letters this year:  https://womenwhosubmitlit.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/the-rejection-game/

I wrote about my long-term adoration for SPK’s Zamia Lehmanni album and the stories I’ve written while listening to it: https://emzbox.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/music-inspiring-writing-loren-rhoads/

David Watson at Horror Addicts really liked Kill By Numbers, the second Templar book: https://horroraddicts.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/davids-haunted-library-kill-by-numbers/

My Wave Organ piece is out in SEARCH magazine and you can download a free copy here: https://searchmagazinenet.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/search-magazine-4-spring-2016/

And finally, Margaret L. Carter interviewed me at length about Dracula and succubi for the next issue of her deliciously dark newsletter. You can subscribe to it here:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/margaretlcartersnewsfromthecrypt

 

In Memory of Jane

Jane Underwood, my writing teacher, died in February after an 11-year battle with breast cancer.  Her life will be celebrated in the AIDS Grove in Golden Gate Park tomorrow morning.

I’ve been trying to write this post all week.

My relationship with Jane was complicated. I met her the summer of 2002, when I signed up to take a Personal Essay Writing class she was teaching.  I’d been writing essays for almost 10 years at that point, but I wanted to know how to do it better.  How to do it right.  The week after the class began, my brother died suddenly.  I flew back to Michigan overnight.  I told Jane I needed to drop the class and hoped I could get a credit to take it again another time, since I didn’t know how long I would have to be away, helping my parents clean out Allen’s house and settle his business.

To say I was shocked, stunned, and writing was the last thing on my mind would be to understate it. Even so, Jane wouldn’t let me drop the class. She encouraged me to write, whenever and whatever I could, as a way to work through my grief. She would be my partner, reading my work, offering gentle suggestions and careful criticism.  It was some of the rawest work I’ve ever done. One of the pieces I wrote in the haze of grief became the introduction to Morbid Curiosity #7.

The Writing Salon was Jane’s business, her baby.  She didn’t give refunds or credits.  Once you paid your money, it was hers.  Knowing how flakey writers can be, I appreciate that. She could have simply pointed me toward her “no refunds” policy and been done, but she let me vent at a time when I needed it desperately.  She showed me how to spin pain so deep I couldn’t see into words.  It was one of the turning points of my life.

Over the years, I took more classes at the Salon, some with Jane as teacher, others with Jane as a fellow student. I came to admire her candor and her diplomatic skills, her graceful writing and bravery in choosing topics.  The Writing Salon introduced me to public speaking as a skill to study, as well as crafting a nonfiction book proposal (and I credit that class with netting me the bidding war for Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues), blogging as a business, and podcasting.

I even worked for the Writing Salon for a couple of years, walking around San Francisco to put up flyers to advertise its classes.  In return, Jane let me participate in her Round Robin classes for free.  In the end, I took the Round Robin (or served as an alternate when Jane needed a sub to step in) 27 times.  I used it to write short stories for both Haunted Mansion Project books and Demon Lovers, as well as the story I just sold to Fright Mare: Women Write Horror.  I’ve written essays which have appeared in Wish You Were Here, Writing in Cafes, and in my blogs.  I used the process to finish The Dangerous Type and work on The Shadow of Death, my work-in-progress. (A new session is starting on Monday — and you don’t have to be in San Francisco to take it.)

Jane also gave me my first opportunity to teach.  I’ve struggled for years with learning how to read my work in public.  Jane let me teach Reading Your Own Work for the first time in July 2012.  It didn’t draw many students — and I would have taught the class for free.  But Jane gave me my first teacher’s paycheck.  It meant the world to me.

All of this was spooling out while Jane fought breast cancer. She was diagnosed in 2005 after she found a lump in her breast.  Her insurance company dropped her — just as she was on the verge of chemotherapy — because it believed the cancer must have been a pre-existing condition. I was horrified by their callousness and galvanized into doing the Avon Walk twice to raise money for research.

Jane’s honesty when it came to her disease gave me a whole new admiration for her. She wasn’t content to pursue treatments that the doctors insisted were necessary. She did her own research, consulted experts, and put together her own regimen. It wasn’t an easy road: completely overhauling her old life, adopting a dog, moving in with her boyfriend, studying photography, all the while continuing to run the Writing Salon, without the benefit of health insurance or a “real” job.

Jane touched innumerable lives.  She could be prickly and plain-spoken, stubborn and fierce.  I never knew her well, but I knew she would always be honest with me.  When she took one of my ideas for a writing class and gave it to other teachers who had a bigger draw, I was stung and separated myself from the Writing Salon for a while.  I understood why she made the choice she did.  It still hurt.

In October last year, I swallowed my pride and wrote to tell her I’d thanked her and the Writing Salon in my space opera trilogy.  Over the course of all those Round Robins, I’d learned how to sit down and do the work. I wanted to acknowledge how much Jane had taught me.  At that point, the cancer had spread to her bones and she was housebound, “doing my best,” she wrote, “to walk that tightrope between remaining hopeful/optimistic and being accepting/realistic.”  She was still running the Writing Salon and trying to complete a collection of poems.

I knew Jane for the better part of 14 years.  I learned an immense amount from her, even as she sometimes frustrated me.  I am so sorry that she’s gone, but I’m glad her suffering is over at last.  She will be missed.

 

On Applying Criticism

At Clarion, beside Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm

I’m working on polishing up a story I wrote more than 30 years ago.  It was my submission story for Clarion. (Back then, you only needed to write one.)  I workshopped it for years afterward, trying to get it right.  I submitted it and got wonderful rejection slips. Gordon Linzner, then editing Space & Time, said it had “powerful images and good characterization.”  Even so, it never found a home and I eventually abandoned it.

Now that I’ve fished it out and taken another look at it, the story is nearly ready to submit as it is.  Thirty years later, I don’t remember why I gave up on it, but it won’t take much work to get it up to my current standards, applying everything I’ve learned in the last 30 years.

One of the things in the story’s folder is a critique from Thomas Disch, one of my Clarion instructors.  It opens with, “You seem ‘heavy’ into urban desolation and the ‘cool’ of street life.  Your competition is Ellison.  Do you do it better than he does?”

Reading it now, 30 years later, the remark is still crushing.  Now, though, I’m mature enough to think, “Of course I wasn’t in competition with Ellison.  He was Harlan fucking Ellison. I was a 22-year-old from Flint, Michigan, which was in the midst of the Crack Epidemic after General Motors gutted the town.  I saw the devastation firsthand and extrapolated from it, but in no way would anyone ever believe that there was only room for one writer of desolate apocalyptic science fiction or expect a young unpublished writer to unseat its master.”

I’m not sure what Disch intended by the comment.  It’s hard to read it as encouragement: “Can you do it better than he does?”  “Will you do it better than he does?” or “Strive to do it as well as he does.”  I don’t know if Disch was challenging me to outdo Ellison at his own game. I still don’t feel up to that.

Disch continued on to criticize (justly) the way I’d structured the story and the fact that I focused on the story’s witness, not its hero.  Of all my Clarion instructors, he was the most helpful when it came to think about how to overhaul the story.  He just made it unnecessarily difficult to see past his opening salvo to the help he offered.

In contrast, John Kessel focused on the melodramatics in the story.  It was certainly overdramatic — and having that pointed out to me did help.  Either Kessel didn’t write me an overview or else I didn’t keep it.  My notes on his in-class critique are “some of the writing is quite good, but the explanations are improbable.”

Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, the program’s final teachers, read both the submission draft and the first revision.  They dialed in on the story’s language, editing it as if it was a finished piece.  It wasn’t, but I did learn a lot about what they liked in the revision and what they’d preferred in the original.

After Clarion, I worked my way through the creative writing staff at the University of Michigan.  My favorite of those critiques is by Tish Ezekiel, who said, “This is interesting — and horrid.  I don’t really know where you might send this, but you ought to send it out.”

In all, I submitted the story to eleven magazines before I gave up on it.  Five of those gave me comments or personal encouragement.  I can’t remember now why I shelved it.  But because I’m a packrat and I’ve kept practically everything, I’m going to apply those lessons from long ago to make this the best story it can be.

Then I’m going to ritually burn Tom Disch’s critique.

 

Win a copy of Lost Angels

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Lost Angels
by Loren Rhoads

Giveaway ends April 13, 2016.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Curious about the new edition of my succubus/angel/mortal ghost novel?  I’m giving away 3 paperback copies on Goodreads.

“Fans of paranormal romance, urban fantasies, kick-ass fights, and some pretty damn hot sex, check out Lost Angels, by Loren Rhoads and Brian Thomas!”

— Dana Fredsti, author of Plague Town, Plague Nation, and Plague World

Learn more about the book here.

I read a book so great I have to share!

The Fifth House of the Heart by Ben Tripp

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I adored this book, almost solely because of the main character. Asmodeus Saxon-Tang is a septuagenarian antiques dealer who dresses like Quentin Crisp and has led three expeditions to kill vampires. These aren’t your sparkly broody vampires, either. In fact, they take Dracula a step farther. Sax undervalues the courage he shows, all the while remarking on the hotness of the killers he’s assembled around him. He’s the most fascinating character I’ve met in a long time.

The only time the book was in danger of losing me was its first chapter, which concerns a Mumbai dancer in Bollywood movies. For one thing, I had trouble believing that a woman so concerned with being “ruined” would go alone to a party. For another, she seemed set up as a classic victim, someone you care about solely so she can be torn apart. I won’t say that I became satisfied with her part in the story, but I am glad I looked past it to read the rest of the book.

I could barely put the book down last night and it troubled my dreams. I actually got up early so that I could finish it this morning. That almost never happens to me any more.

You can order your own copy from Amazon, but I bought mine from Borderlands Bookstore, on recommendation of Jude Feldman.  From now on, I’m always going to ask what she’s reading whenever I come into the store.

View all my reviews on Goodreads.

Lost Angels giveaway tonight!

If you’re coming to the Sponsors Party at the Borderlands Bookstore tonight, I’ll be giving out advance copies of Lost Angels, the new edition of As Above, So Below. Sorry for the last-minute notice!

The book itself will be out on April 6.

I’ve arranged a giveaway through Goodreads starting next week and I should be kicking into the next blog tour shortly.  I’ll keep you posted.

I’m really excited to have updated Lorelei’s story. There’s just a taste of the second book, Angelus Rose, which will be coming out in November.

And there’s an announcement that I’m super-thrilled about in the very back of the book:

 

David’s Haunted Library: Kill By Numbers

Horror Addicts likes Kill By Numbers!

horroraddicts.net

It’s tough to be a human in space. Other races look down on humans because they think of them as violent sociopaths. With the human empire disbanded, they are spread out across the galaxy trying to make a living. This brings us to former assassin Raena  who is trying to get a new start on board the alien space ship,the Veracity. Raena has a complicated past, she was a prisoner as the Templars were wiped out by a genetic plague and the situation has created some bad psychological effects.

Raena is having nightmares of shooting her ex-lover in the head and she has to deal with the fact that the now extinct Templars have left booby-trapped biotechnology throughout the galaxy and her ship is infected. Raena and the pirate crew that she is with must learn to trust each other and figure out how to fix the booby-trapped technology or the…

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Survivor Narratives

The day I moved into my dorm, alone for the first time in my life, my room phone rang. I was desperately lonely. I didn’t know a single person on campus. I thought it might be my mom. The man on the other end of the phone told me he was going to tear off my panties and stuff them in my mouth so that no one would hear me scream as he raped me.

I laughed at him, told him what a sad little monkey he was, that his tiny dick wouldn’t hurt a fly, and hung up.  Then I didn’t leave my room for hours, terrified that he was watching me.

The commonly accepted statistic at the time said that 1 in 4 women would be raped while they were at University.  Before I left Ann Arbor four years later, one friend had been drugged and raped at a fraternity party. One friend had been raped repeatedly by her boyfriend. One had been chased into an alley outside a bar. Her attacker tore the pierced earrings from her ear as he raped her. She will wear those scars for the rest of her life.

I was the lucky one.  I was followed out of the dorm cafeteria by a boy that the University had on suicide watch.  He knocked my female friend aside to grab me from behind, then fondled my breasts, licked me from jaw to hairline, and ground his hard-on into my ass.

The hallway was full of people.  No one stepped in because they thought I knew this guy.  No one reacted at all — even my friend — until I started cursing my attacker.

His response? “I just don’t understand you girls.  You send such mixed signals.”

I wasn’t hurt, but the clerk at the dorm’s desk — who’d seen everything — asked if I wanted to call the police.  The cop I spoke to was dismissive of me for wasting his time.

My dorm advisor asked me not to press charges because the University felt sorry for the poor unhinged boy.  His parents came that afternoon and moved him home.  I was safe. He was gone from campus.  Still, my boyfriend came and got me from my dorm room.  His mother let me spend the night at their house.

After that I had to deal with the fallout. My mom was angry that I called my boyfriend first — even though he lived in town and she was an hour away. The police pressured me to press charges.  They made it clear that if he ever attacked anyone else, it would be my fault for not putting him away. The dorm advisor didn’t understand what my problem was, since he didn’t hurt me.

I got so I couldn’t walk across campus alone, without a male escort.  I’d been grabbed in daylight, in a busy dorm hallway, with a girlfriend at my elbow.  I was sober.  I was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans.  I could not have done anything to make myself safe.  There really was no safe place.

To this day, more than 30 years later, my blood still runs cold when someone walks behind me and jingles their keys.  My attacker did that, as he worked up his nerve to grope me.  My body remembers the sound before my brain can.  I am embarrassed and disgusted and afraid all over again.

One night, a couple of weeks after the attack, I took too many pills. I didn’t understand why until much later.

Eventually, slowly, I got my courage back.  I met a woman who was raped while at school in Paris.  In San Francisco, she worked as a sex worker, working through her trauma and reclaiming her power by doing rape scenes.

I only met one man who was open about having been raped.  The number of women in my acquaintance who had been abused or terrorized or hurt grew.

My point is, of the four of us who went through school together, of the people I met later, I was the only one who reported it to the police. I began to see how the statistics were only the iceberg’s tip.

Years later, I went camping with my boyfriend. We were alone at a lonely oceanside campsite, miles from people. These were the days before cellphones. The sex started out consensually, but he was pushing me, trying to break me, using his penis to win an argument.

I thought I could just go away from my body and wait until it was over.  I was stubborn and scared. I thought I loved him. I didn’t know where my purse was, where my car keys were. I didn’t know where my jeans were. I thought he loved me.  I could run naked out to the highway in the middle of nowhere, if I wanted to be dramatic about it, but there were 40 thousand ways that could go worse than what was happening to me at the moment.

I felt something tear. I started to cry. “You’re hurting me,” I said at last.

“Yeah.”

“Stop. Please stop. Just stop. It hurts.”

And there was a moment – just a moment – when he thought about whether he wanted to stop or not. It was the longest moment of my life.

So I write about rape in my novels. Raena was raped by her commander. Alondra was raped as a child. Lorelei learns to take control of her own body and to enforce it when she says no. I am not interested in the act of rape. I am interested in how women handle the damage to their souls. How they put their own pieces together again. How they learn to love themselves beyond what they’ve lost.  How they regain control.

Putting my own self back together has been a journey. I am healing through my stories. I hope that my stories help other women to find their strength and see the beauty in themselves, too. Until rape stops happening, there will be survivors recovering from it. My stories are for them and for me. This is why I write about rape.