Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 57

Never Enough, 2014

Every year I recap the writing triumphs and disappointments of the previous twelve months and every year I feel like it’s never enough. This year especially, while I waited to get my first space opera back from the editor, I didn’t commit to any longer projects, so I’m disappointed in myself for fooling around. But I did manage to jump on almost every guest-posting opportunity I saw, as well as doing a bunch of interviews and assorted networking. Now that I gather all the links together, it looks like I was busier than I thought.

The highlight of the year was the publication of As Above, So Below by Black Bed Sheet Books. It was a thrill to finally see one of my novels in print.

Another highlight was seeing the design for The Dangerous Type. Night Shade Books will be publishing it in July next year, but it’s already available for preorder on Amazon.

I’m really proud of All You Need is Morbid, my morbid travel memoir that was published on Wattpad over the summer. You can read it for free here.

My only short fiction publication this year was “The Dream of Grandfather Carp,” which appears in the Out of the Green anthology.

I’m excited about providing a monthly morbid travel column to Scoutie Girl. I’ve written about the Pharmacy Museum in New Orleans, eating in total darkness in San Francisco, and my adoration of Niagara Falls, among other things. The complete list of topics is here: http://lorenrhoads.com/nonfiction/scoutie-girl-columns/

Readings:

* I read parts of As Above, So Below and The Dangerous Type at World Horror 2014 in Portland in May

* I read from “A Curiosity of Shadows” for the Night of Eternal Damnation at Litcrawl

* The highlight, of course, was giving my speech “Where Have All the Graveyards Gone: the Pioneer Burial Grounds in San Francisco and the Grave Migration to Colma” at Death Salon: San Francisco

Radio:

I only did two radio/podcasts this year:

* Francy & Friends on Blog Talk Radio in January

* Charred Remains on Blog Talk Radio in June

Interviews:

* “This is the Life of a Graveyard Tourist” by Cheryl Eddy appeared on io9

I got interviewed a bunch in 2014:

* on Scoutie Girl by Amanda Rose

* on Goodreads by Natasha Ewendt

* on Smashwords about Sins of the Sirens

* on the Travel Tester blog by Nienke Krook for her Vintage Travel Memories feature

* by Tonia Brown on her Backseat Writer blog

Cemetery Expert:

* “The World’s Most Beautiful Cemeteries” piece initially appeared on Travel & Leisure‘s site, but was picked up by Smithsonian.com and a bunch of other places

* Kristi Palma interviewed me for “A Fun-Filled Day in the Cemetery? Absolutely!” which appeared on Boston.com

Guest Posts:

I did a ton of guest posts this year.

* two pieces appeared on Horror Addicts, about “Character Generation” and the ghosts of the Haunted Mansion Retreat.

* two pieces appeared in the Western Legends blog, both relating to Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel: “Adventures in Cemetery Travel” and “Island of the Dead“

* “Where Horror Lies” appeared in the Halloween Haunts feature on the Horror Writers Association blog

* a piece called “Permanent Florentines,” drawn from Wish You Were Here was published on Wicked World

* “Anatomy Lab” was published twice on Josh Perry’s Gravecast blog

* Ty Schwamberger did a March Plug post on As Above, So Below

* Armand Rosamilia ran a Spotlight on me, related to Authors Supporting Our Troops 2014

* I joined the Meet My Character blog hop, inspired by Laurel Anne Hill’s blog

* And I contributed a Horror Selfie to the HWA’s promotion

Blogging:

In terms of blogging, the Red Room was sold suddenly in June, so I had to take down my blog there. On this Morbid is as Morbid Does blog, I achieved 98 new posts (10 more than last year). I wrote 76 posts on Cemetery Travel this year and doubled my page views from all the previous years combined. And I managed 119 posts on my Cemetery Postcards tumblr, before I got overwhelmed by the research.

Random Things I did this year:

I set up cemetery tours of Rose Hill Cemetery at the Black Diamond Mines State Historic Park, the Mare Island Naval Cemetery, the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery, and the Union Cemetery of Redwood City for the Atlas Obscura Society. That was amazingly fun. I’m sorry it had to come to an end.

I worked on a book collecting my Writing In Cafes essays on Wattpad. It’s called Writing in Cafes: A How-To Guide for Authors. I hope to get in finished in the new year, but you can read it for free now.

I made book trailers for As Above, So Below and the Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two. Once I settle down, I have footage shot by the brilliant Brian Thomas to edit into an About Me video.  That’s another project for the new year.

My Scoutie Girl columns

This time last year, I was reading twitter and discovered that one of the online women’s magazines was looking for a travel writer. I’ve missed the discipline of a monthly deadline ever since I stopped writing for Gothic.Net. I got in touch, sent her a link to a sample of my writing (my blog post about visiting the swamp outside of New Orleans with my daughter), and got the gig.

I’ve been keeping a list of my columns under the Nonfiction tab above, but in case you missed it, I wanted to post them here, too.

I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to describe my adventures for readers every month. I’ve written mostly about traveling with my family, because eventually I am going to pull together a book I’ve been thinking of as the Morbid Mom Memoir. These columns may get collected into that.

The most popular piece I wrote was the one in October about taking your kids to the graveyard.

I think the editor’s favorite was November’s piece, about my spa visit to be buried in cedar shavings at Osmosis.

The one that got the most comments was the piece about seeing the treasures of the Detroit Institute of Arts before the museum begins to sell its collection to pay the city’s debts.

It’s hard for me to choose a favorite, but I’m really proud of the work I’ve done on these. Every month, writing about my adventures revealed something to me that I’d missed in the excitement of the moment. I learned something (or more rarely, taught my daughter something). It’s been a blessing to have the monthly reminder to slow down, rethink, and treasure these experiences. Time is blasting by so quickly these days that even my 11-year-old has noticed it.

If any of these thumbnails catch your attention, you can click on the titles and read the full stories.

POSTS BY LOREN RHOADS:

 

December 12, 2014

Watching Whales

My brother wanted to do one thing when he visited me in San Francisco: see whales. He’d never been on a boat on the ocean, never even seen an ocean. He’d never seen anything as big as a whale.

For 30 years, the Oceanic Society has offered whale-watching tours along the California coast. I chose a tour out to the Farallon Islands, 25 miles off the San Francisco Coast. We’d have the possibility of seeing blue whales, the largest animals that ever to live on earth. I made sure Allen understood that they couldn’t promise we’d see anything. Viewing whales wasn’t like going to the zoo for the 10:00 feeding. Whales come and go as they please.

 

November 3, 2014

Partial Metamorphosis

I rarely allow myself a day off, so when I finally did, I wanted it to be really special. That meant escaping my office, leaving my computer behind, and being completely unable to do work.

No notebooks, no emails, no expectations.

My plan was to leave home hours early, have a leisurely drive north, and spend a relaxing day atOsmosis Day Spa Sanctuary in Sonoma County.

October 7, 2014

Take your Children to the Graveyard!

“I bet I’m the only kid who goes to cemeteries on vacation,” my 11-year-old daughter boasted.

My daughter Sorrell’s been visiting cemeteries since she was an infant in a Baby Bjorn. I think her first was immediately after an exhibit of funeral antiques at a local history museum, but I have a photo of her bundled up to visit the Leland Stanford mausoleum on the grounds of his namesake university. She was all of 8 months old….

September 9, 2014

Come Sail Away

We didn’t get shown to our room so much as directed to it. The crewman walked us to the hatch. A very steep ladder led down to a small vestibule with a sink and a mirror. Four doors led off of it to the cabins.

“Always go down facing the ladder,” Adam directed. “And remember, it’s a few steps farther down than you think.”

 

August 5, 2014

Natural Wonder

“I didn’t know they were so big,” my daughter Sorrell said, not taking her eyes off Niagara Falls.

A vivid rainbow arced above the horseshoe-shaped Canadian falls.  We leaned over the railing to gaze down at the Maid of the Mist, creeping closer to the base of the cascade.

“The boat looks like a toy, doesn’t it?” I asked.

“We’ll ride on it tomorrow,” my mom promised….

July 17, 2014

The City Deer and the Country Deer

I grew up in the country, so it’s important to me that my city-girl daughter grows up with a healthy respect for animals. That may have taken root too well: she wants to adopt one of every animal she comes across.

When Sorrell was little, she wanted a deer. She spun a whole scenario that when we visited my parents, she would capture one of the white-tailed deer who came down to drink at the creek. She would put the deer in a sack and carry it on the plane back to San Francisco, where it would become her pet and live in our backyard.

She drew lots of pictures to illustrate key parts of the plan….

Jun 20, 2014
Adventures in Air & Space

 We walked up to the ticket desk in a knot. The clerk asked which ride we wanted: if we did the motion simulator, the three of us could go together, but the machine moved on its own. No one would be controlling it. If we chose the flight simulator, it only sat two.

Sorrell really wanted to fly the simulator herself….

 

My photo of the tour where Joan may have been imprisoned.

May 27, 2014
A Passion for St. Joan

Joan of Arc has long been a heroine of mine. That she was a warrior when women rarely left their villages would have been enough to intrigue me, but that she led the French army to victory against the English while a teenaged peasant girl amazed me….

April 29, 2014
Dining in the Dark

Who would want to eat in the dark? When I told my friends about San Francisco’s Opaque restaurant, the general reaction was “Why would you want to do that?” As my birthday drew nearer, I made a reservation. Then I told my husband, Mason — and gave him the out that if he didn’t want to come, I’d try to find another date. I couldn’t envision going alone….

March 20, 2014
Art Treasures

The last time I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts was in the late ’80s when my husband and I drove down to hear punk rock icon Lydia Lunch speak. Woodward from the highway looked like a demilitarized zone, lined with gutted derelict buildings and full of windblown trash. We were relieved to be able to drive into the garage beneath the art museum and not have to leave our car on the street.

Detroit has changed a lot since then, but its money woes linger. Last year, when there began to be talk of selling some of the city-owned artwork, I decided I needed to take our daughter down to see the DIA one last time, while its collection was still intact….

February 27, 2014
A Dose of Reality in New Orleans

One of my favorite places in New Orleans has nothing to do with voodoo or food or letting the good times roll. Instead, it’s a small museum full of dusty poisons and wicked-looking metal tools. I couldn’t wait to introduce my daughter to it….

January 30, 2014
Sleeping with the Fishes

Some opportunities have expiration dates. Beyond the traditional bucket list, I need to do all the things that I can only do in the company of a kid now, while my kid still wants to keep company with me. Besides that, I love the idea of sleeping in strange places. Ever since the program started, I’ve wanted to sleep overnight in the California Academy of Sciences at their Penguins + Pajamas event.…

The Morbid Roundup

King of This World on the ceiling at Urban Putt, San Francisco.

I’ve been cranking on the second book of the space opera trilogy.  It’s now called Kill By Numbers and should be out in September 2015.  I’m a little less than 20,000 words from done, so I probably won’t blog too much until I get that bad boy turned in.

The third book will be No More Heroes. It should be out in November 2015.  I haven’t written much of it yet, but I’m pleased with how it begins.

What with the writing space opera all day every day, my guest-posting has slowed down.  Even so, there have been a couple of new pieces up that I wanted to tell you about.

Horror Addicts is featuring ghost stories this month, so I contributed mine about the time the ghost touched me during the Haunted Mansion Retreat.  Here’s the link.

I’ve got a story about whale-watching at the Farallon Islands up at Scoutie Girl.

My thoughts on how cemeteries are affected by weather has been getting a lot of reads, too.  Check it out on CemeteryTravel.com.

That’s it for now. I’m trying to keep myself healthy and inspired and write, write, write. Suggestions of science fiction movies I should see are much appreciated.  Even my downtime is research, at this point.

The Dream of Grandfather Carp

One of the creative writing classes I took at the university assigned a book of short stories as the text. The teacher prepared a list of story collections for every taste, ranging from Raymond Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. We were supposed to choose one we hadn’t read before.

I liked the sound of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, with its fairy tales for grownups. I was quickly absorbed by the lush, decadent prose. I fell in love with Carter after I read her takes on the Big Bad Wolf and Bluebeard’s Wife.

My classmates were all solidly literary, with none of the messy genre inclinations I felt. I wanted to write a modern fairy tale, but I didn’t think I could get away with anything like Cinderella’s sorority sisters cutting off their heels to fit into the magic shoe.

So I wrote a fairy tale for the modern age.

One of the places I loved most of all at the University of Michigan was the greenhouse at the botanical garden. Especially when the snow flew outside, the temperate house was toasty warm, filled with the scents of good clean earth and flowers.

My favorite part of the greenhouse was the carp pond, with its waterlilies. I’d take my notebook and sit at the edge of the pool, listening to the waterfall trickling into the pool and watching the giant koi glide. I wanted to honor the place by setting a story there.

I workshopped “Grandfather Carp’s Dream” over and over, over the years. Most genre readers thought it stopped too soon. Most literary readers didn’t like the flavor of magic. The story never found a home. Since it wasn’t based on a familiar fairy tale, it didn’t fit most fairy tale anthologies. It didn’t have big magic or world-altering danger. It didn’t resolve into a pretty Happily Ever After. It remained a touch too literary. No one seemed to be publishing magical realism under 2000 words.

And yet it was exactly the story I wanted. My point was that the botanical student is aching and lonely, even as he’s consumed by his studies – like young men I met at the university. The fairy is alien and equally lonely. They deserved – needed – each other.

I didn’t want to resolve their relationship. I wanted the reader to do that for herself. Would they get their happy ending or would his apartment be filled with dragonflies and sparrows come spring? Could the carp let her go with his blessings?

I was thrilled with Martha J. Allard invited me to submit to an anthology she was editing. I worried that my fairy wouldn’t be classical enough: no wings, no pixie dust, but instead a direct and powerful connection to nature – and a desire for something more for herself.

Martha surprised me by accepting the story. The anthology, called Out of the Green, is available now on Amazon.

The Weekly Morbid, two weeks later

I finally got The Dangerous Type turned in to Night Shade Books, then dove directly into working on the sequel.  I was calling it No More Heroes, which is still a great title but maybe not the best one for this book.  Hopefully, something will come to me soon.

All the concentration on the space opera has cut down on my writing and submitting elsewhere (and blogging here), but I have a couple of things to report.

My latest Scoutie Girl column was about taking a day off and figuring out who I am: http://www.scoutiegirl.com/partial-metamorphosis/

Scoutie Girl interviewed me, too:  http://www.scoutiegirl.com/contributor-appreciation-month-loren-rhoads/

I wrote about developing characters for Horror Addicts: http://horroraddicts.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/loren-rhoads-on-horror-writing/

And I added another chapter to my guide to Writing in Cafes for authors: http://www.wattpad.com/82753215-writing-in-cafes-a-how-to-guide-for-authors

I’m hoping to get the first chapter of The Dangerous Type #2 turned in by the end of next week.  Wish me luck!

Testing my website’s usability

One of the women in the 100 Rejection Letters program suggested Peek as a website that looks into the usability of websites.  I’ve been curious about how I should overhaul Morbid Is to make it friendlier and more welcoming, so I figured I’d submit the url for a random user’s impressions.

And this user was certainly random.  He was struck by the title of Morbid Is as Morbid Does and seemed put off my it.  He glanced over the navigation bar beneath the photo and decided I must be a performance artist — somehow skimming over the Fiction and Nonfiction tabs that precede Performance.

His most helpful comment was to make the subtitle larger, which I think I can do on WordPress.  He also wanted it to make it clear that I’m an author from the first, but I’m not sure how anyone might land on my page without knowing that — and I’ve always felt the FB or Twitter handles that designate someone as “Author Jane Smith” were pretentious.

Finally he suggested I have a welcome page, rather than having the site open immediately onto my blog.  That’s something I’ve considered before, although I’m usually underwhelmed and irritated by people’s landing pages slowing me down on the way to the content I want.  Maybe I’ll make a landing page and see how I feel about it later.  I think there’s a way to change what is considered Home on WordPress.

Would Peek be useful for you to check out?  I’m not sure.  The site doesn’t ask anything about what the site is before passing its url along, so the users are truly coming to you blind.  Are random strangers likely to wander by your site?

I would have found it more useful to have another author or an editor or, even better, a reader look over my site.  Apparently, as part of its paid tier, Peek can match you up more closely with your target audience.  I’m not sure if I will take them up on that, but the $49 for a basic video test seems reasonable.

If you’re interested, here’s the free video test of this site: http://peek.usertesting.com/result/0385817526922?autoplay=true

Here’s their advertisement of what they do:

Get a peek into your site’s usability.

Finishing The Dangerous Type

I am finally within a couple of days of finishing the first book in the trilogy of my Hong Kong revenge story space opera.  Working on the book is taking all my mental energy these days.  Even when I’m not sitting in front of the book files, the wheels are turning in my brain.  There’s so much I want to remember to put in or smooth out or polish up.

I’ve been through the editor’s notes and answered almost all of his questions.  There are a few more things I need to nail down tomorrow.  Then I want to go back through all the lists of things I’ve scribbled down as I’ve read and reread the book, make sure they have all been addressed.

My goal is to turn it all in by the end of the week.  Then I won’t see it again until the proofreader has been over it, but hopefully I won’t have screwed anything up too badly.  I’ve read the book over so many times now that I can’t see missing words or scrambled syntax any more.  I need to take a break from it, so I can see it again with fresh eyes.

This is the scary part for me.  I’ve put such incredible pressure on myself to make this book perfect that I had a panic attack yesterday.  Mason was able to talk me down, but it was a rough day.

One of the things I’m mulling is how to celebrate when this book is done.  When Brian and I finished As Above, So Below, we bought each other gifts.  I gave him a clock with Anton LaVey’s face on it.  He gave me a chrome-plated martini shaker engraved with “Lost Angels.”  They were the perfect mementos.

I don’t have much money to spend, what with the $580 parking fine I had to pay last month.  Even so, I’d like to get myself something concrete, but this rates more than another book or a pair of earrings or a slice of chocolate cake.

Do you have any suggestions?  What should I give myself or treat myself to in order to commemorate the end of Book 1?

 

The Weekly Morbid, weekend edition

Halloween Tree photo by Mason Jones.

Whew!  Halfway through the Days of the Dead, I find myself looking forward to the relative calm of Nanowrimo.  October has been a whirlwind of talking to people about cemeteries, visiting cemeteries, photographing cemeteries, and writing a ton of guest posts for people.  Not all of those are live yet, so I won’t link them here.  Soon, though.

Last week, I had a great phone conversation with Kristi Palma from Boston.com.  That led to her quoting me in A Fun-Filled Day in the Cemetery? Absolutely!

The Frugal Travel Guy site name-checked Wish You Were Here in their story Walking Among the Dead: The Art of Cemetery Travel.

Last night I vanity googled myself and found a review of Wish You Were Here in Indonesian.  It’s worth translating it, if you find that sort of thing amusing:  http://lifestyle.liputan6.com/read/2020463/loren-rhoads-wanita-si-penjelajah-makam-1

In other news, Natasha Ewendt interviewed me writing and As Above, So Below on her blog on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7082805.Natasha_Ewendt/blog

Finally, the cover has been revealed on Amazon for the first book of my space opera trilogy, The Dangerous Type. You can even preorder the book already.

This upcoming week, I’m going to finish up the final revisions to The Dangerous Type and turn the text in, so I’m really excited to get that taken care of so I can start finishing the second book.

The Weekly Morbid, mid-week edition

My plan for this month was simple: Blog every day, whether here or on Cemetery Travel.  Write a bunch of guest posts for other people’s blogs. Enjoy the Death Salon and Litquake.

Being sick for two and a half weeks scaled that all back drastically. I kept up the guest post writing, but the blogging fell apart.

I didn’t factor in all the interviewing I’d get this month, which has been a fabulous surprise.  I’ve told you about the Travel and Leisure piece, but there’s also a piece coming up on Boston.com this week, too.

Last month, I chatted with Cheryl Eddy, whom I’ve read for over a decade at the San Francisco Bay Guardian (RIP). Our interview about traveling around to visit cemeteries and Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues went up on Monday at io9.com: http://io9.com/this-is-the-life-of-a-graveyard-tourist-1651350544

This morning, an interview I did with Natasha Ewendt went up on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7082805.Natasha_Ewendt/blog

In all the excitement, I think I forgot to tell you about my essay for the HWA’s Halloween Haunt’s blog, about the graves of horror writers, which was published last week:  http://horror.org/halloween-haunts-horror-lies-loren-rhoads/

And you’ve probably seen my Horror Selfie, but just in case: http://horrorselfies.com/loren-rhoads/

It’s been a rich, full month — and passing by in a blur.

Do you have some spooky plans for the weekend?  Why not go to a graveyard? I’m planning to.

Litcrawl 2014

Window display at Casa Bonampak

So another Litquake is over.  I didn’t get to see anything except the one event I performed at, because of this damn cold I’ve been fighting for the last 10 days.  I wanted to see the Being with Death reading and Taxidermy Gone Rogue and Science Fiction in the 21st Century.  Instead, I stayed home and coughed til my chest hurt and my throat felt like I’d swallowed glass.

Last night, though, was really fun.  Kim Richards and William Gilchrist of Damnation Books/Eternal Press took three of us out for dinner at Aslam’s Rasoi, where I had the best mattar paneer ever.

The lovely Rain Graves

Then we were off next door to Casa Bonampak for the Night of Eternal Damnation.

After a brief introduction from Kim, Rain Graves started off the evening by reading “Underneath the Ravens” from The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two.

I followed with excerpts of “A Curiosity of Shadows,” about horror writers and a seance/exorcism from The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One.  There was a moment, in the middle of my second piece, where the crowd fell so silent, I knew I had them.  That was really fun.

Author, Loren Rhodes reading at #litquake 2014 #damnationbooks #eternalpress pic.twitter.com/fh76GpRV3P

— Kim_Richards (@Kim_Richards) October 20, 2014

— photo by Kim_Richards (@Kim_Richards)

 

The lovely Dan Weidman

Then Dan Weidman read from his essay “My Possession” and his humorous poem “Hungry House” from The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two.

Myra Sherman read an excerpt from her upcoming science fiction novel, then Kim rounded out the evening with an excerpt of Catharine Bramkamp’s Future Girls.

We had a pretty good crowd, although like all Litcrawl crowds, people roamed in and out.  The venue had us set up with the clothing racks behind us, which meant for some weird photos.  The sugar skulls and skeletal figures, though, could not have been more appropriate.

A couple of people came up to chat afterward, which is the best part of doing any reading.  I love to hear what the audience thinks.

Next year, though, I am going to stay healthy for the whole month of October, so I can get out and support other readers more.