Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 65
March 17, 2014
Bay Area Cemetery Tours
Reblogged from Cemetery Travel because I want to spread the word about these tours. I’m really excited about being a part of this!
Originally posted on Cemetery Travel: Adventures in Graveyards Around the World:
Rose Hill Cemetery, 2001
I spent last year’s Nanowrimo working on a book about the historic cemeteries of the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve visited a lot of them, but not nearly all, so I made myself a list of places I need to see. Ideally, I could find someone to give me a tour, show me the highlights, and ground my research for each one.
In early February, Annetta Black — mastermind of the Obscura Society in San Francisco — wrote to ask if I’d consider giving cemetery tours for the group.
I am qualified to lead cemetery wanders, but not tours. My knowledge of our local graveyards is broad, rather than deep. However, I would be thrilled to arrange tours for anyone interested in learning more about cemeteries — and now I am.
This Sunday, March 23, the Obscura Society is touring one of my favorite local cemeteries:…
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March 13, 2014
March Plug #4 — Loren Rhoads
Ty Schwamberger was kind enough to post this on his blog for me yesterday.
Originally posted on Ty Schwamberger:
As Above, So Below by Loren Rhoads & Brian Thomas
Synopsis
When the succubus Lorelei sees the angel Azaziel from across the bar, she knows he’s been cast out of Heaven, but is not yet Fallen. She resolves to do whatever it takes to bring the angel down. When she trails him back to his lair in the warehouses outside of downtown Los Angeles, they seduce each other. Later, on the streets of L.A., they encounter Ashleigh Johnson, one of Azaziel’s mortal charges, dying of hepatitis in the street. The angel rescues Ashleigh’s soul from two harpies poised to devour it and uses it to possess Lorelei. Other angels don’t foresee any positive outcome to any of this. In their eyes, their brother has endangered a mortal soul and compromised his own standing in Heaven. When they intrude, Lorelei flees — taking Ashleigh Johnson along for the ride. In…
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March 11, 2014
The Power of Names
As Above, So Below
When I started the first succubus story for Brian, I needed a name for the main character. He was fascinated by Coop’s devil girl stickers: big happy girls who didn’t apologize for liking sex. Coop’s girls looked like they called themselves Candi or Brandi or Mandie, but I didn’t want to go that route.
Down the block from where Brian was living at the time, one of the apartment buildings was called the Lorelei. I didn’t know much about the Lorelei legend, other than she was a siren who led men to their doom. Later I discovered that she was a mermaid and blonde, but I had a cousin named Lorelei and her hair was dark, so it’s all good.
The angel’s name was harder to choose. Brian suggested Azaziel, so I just went with it. The nickname Aza (which we pronounced Ah-za, to follow from Ah-za-zi-el) developed organically, since Lorelei likes to nickname her prey, to find the attribute that sums up their longing and tease them with it: Tiger, Killer, Boss. By dropping the honorific -iel that gets tacked onto most angels’ names, Aza sounds — to Lorelei — halfway fallen already.
Lorelei’s sister Floria’s name came from the opera Tosca, which I saw the San Francisco Opera perform around the time I was working on the story. I liked the rhyme of Lor and Flor and the echo of having three syllables. Luckily, Brian stopped me before I had to name any more three-syllable succubi.
The only character whose name changed radically after we finished the book was Hai. All through the first draft, his name was Tran, which I really liked. At the same time, I was committed to Floria’s boy-toy being named Tuan Nguyen, one of the most common Vietnamese names. The names looked too similar on the page and I became afraid readers would confuse them, so Hai took a minor character’s name.
Brian chose the mortal girl Ashleigh’s name. I protested a little, since we already had Aza and Asmodeus, but once he decided the harpies taunted her by calling her Ashes, I was sold.
Names tell you a lot about a character. I often wonder if writers start with the character and look for a name to match — or if they start with the name and let it define the character?
March 4, 2014
Ready for Luck
I believe in being prepared, in case luck strikes.
A number of years ago, I got invited to participate in a four-woman anthology called Sins of the Sirens. The other women on the invitation list were Mehitobel Wilson, Maria Alexander, and Christa Faust: all of whom were acclaimed as horror writers. All I was known for, if anything, was publishing Morbid Curiosity magazine. Still, when the editor of Sirens took me out for a beer at a convention to pitch the project, he told me that he wanted to build the book around one of my stories. An unpublished story.
See, John Everson used to be the slush reader at a horror magazine called Dark Regions. I’d submitted a story to them. He loved it, passed it up the line…and the other readers rejected it. He fished it out of the rejection pile and asked them to reconsider. In the end, majority ruled.
When we met at a convention several years later, he asked if I’d ever published that story he had loved so much. In fact, I’d stopped sending it out. It was an odd length and I was busily building a novel around it. I planned to send it out again when the novel found a home. (That novel is As Above, So Below, which came out in January.)
Every time we ran into each other, John asked if “his” story had been published. When I’d stopped working on it and moved on to other things, he took matters into his own hands and published it himself.
I feel incredibly lucky: that John is such a nice guy, that he was working for Dark Regions and saw my story, that it stuck in his mind, that he wanted to start a press, that he showcased my work. I feel especially lucky that the royalties for the anthology have been so good and that it sold out its initial printing.
The luck wouldn’t have happened, though, if I hadn’t worked hard to polish the story in the first place. When John asked if I had three other stories he could include in the book, I had some ready to go. I had done as much work as I could to be prepared when luck stepped into my path.
How do you prepare for good luck to strike?
March 1, 2014
New Orleans, I love you
My new travel essay went up on Scoutie Girl this week. This time, I dragged my daughter off to one of my favorite places in New Orleans: the Pharmacy Museum. Where else can you learn about leeches, absinthe, folk medicine, and all the different forms of heroin our ancestors gobbled as medicine?
The choice of the Pharmacy Museum was obvious, since I’m not sure it’s a place many people know about or go out of their way to visit, but I also wanted to write about the Audubon Bug Zoo, which spawned our favorite memory of the trip:
One room housed a handful of baby alligators in a tank. They were floating calmly, just watching us, until one of the keepers climbed up to fish dead water bugs out of the neighboring tank. Then the alligators stood up on their hind legs, front legs folded in front of them hopefully, and begged to be fed.
Of course, the gesture had to be mimicked throughout the rest of our trip. I mean, you’ve never seen anything so cute as baby alligators begging.
Baby alligators begging for a treat.
I’ve already written about going on a walking tour through the swamp. One of these days, I’ll have to write about the ghost tour, too. And roaming around with Dana Fredsti, getting beignets at midnight. And going to the roadhouse in Metairie with Denise Dumars, where the bartender told us about getting anthrax shots in Afghanistan.
It was a great trip. I’m ready for another vacation.
February 24, 2014
February is Women in Horror Month
As Above, So Below
My love of horror dates to my childhood, to Sir Graves Ghastly showing creature features on Saturday afternoons. Or maybe it dates to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, where the Huntsman cuts Red Riding Hood from the wolf’s stomach and Snow White and Rose Red dance with a bear. Or maybe it dates to the plagues of Exodus and god drowning the entire world except for a handful of shipbuilders trapped on a boat with increasingly hungry predators. Maybe it was always there.
The first story I had published was a Lovecraft pastiche. In high school, I published a cross-genre zine called Sanity, Ltd. I got my first fan letter after a dark Star Wars fanfic was published when I was in college. I’ve been writing horror stories for a long time.
More recently, I’ve published horror about post-apocalyptic Detroit, cutting out an immortal’s heart, sexy vampires, insatiable energy drinkers, a MFA photographer with a death fetish, ghosts, witches, and a certain sympathetic succubus who scores with Led Zeppelin.
Still, I was surprised and very honored to find myself on this list of 10 Bay Area Women who Write Horror. Never in my wildest dreams did I envision my name on a list with Anne Rice and Jewelle Gomez.
And it’s by no means a comprehensive list. Right off the top of my head, I would add
February 19, 2014
Letting Morpheus Go
Morpheus and Nocturne
In December 2012, we adopted a tiny black kitten from the local SPCA. He was meant to be a companion for our older cat, another SPCA baby we called Nocturne. She was 3.
The kitten was named Scrappy, because he’d been discovered on the conveyor belt at the massive recycling center at the San Francisco dump. Someone had put him into a recycling bin at the curb, from which he got dumped into a truck. It was a wonder the trip hadn’t killed him.
We had already signed the paperwork for him when the adoption counselor said, “Oh, he’s been fostered. Let’s see what they had to report.” Warning bells should have gone off: he’d vomited a lot. They’d worried and fussed over him. But we’d fallen in love — and the paperwork was signed and our credit card already charged. So we brought him home.
He immediately came down with a respiratory infection. The SPCA wouldn’t see him for two weeks, so we tried another vet. They diagnosed an allergy to his plastic food dish, which was making his lower lip swell.
Morpheus and Nocturne
That was the first allergy. We went through cat food after cat food, trying to find something that he could keep down. They thought he might be allergic to chicken. Or maybe dust. Or maybe the other cat.
In his first three months, Scrappy — now named Morpheus — saw four different doctors at three different clinics. They diagnosed a flea problem (although we have seen never seen a flea or suffered any bites). They prescribed Omega 3 oil (which he ran away from) and sardines (which Nocturne loved). He took a daily immune booster and two kinds of spleen pills. His weight ballooned.
He would lick the fur from his skin, then lick his skin until it bled. We were in for steroid shots or antibiotics or both over and over and over. The interval between treatments grew shorter. Through all of this, both my husband and I were working at home and neither of us was getting paid. The bills added up.
Yesterday the doctor prescribed a daily steroid cream. It’s being made by a compounding pharmacy here in town. I was afraid to ask how much it would cost. He’s supposed to stop eating the $30 cat food and starting eating raw food, which is $50 a bag. The pet store didn’t have the salmon flavor the doctor ordered, so I brought home rabbit. Neither cat will touch it.
Morpheus asleep on my desk
For a long time, I wanted to keep Morpheus, to nurse him. I wanted to show my daughter that you keep the commitments you make, even when you don’t understand what they are when you make them. I had no idea what we were in for when we brought our boy home. I feed him measured amounts four times a day. I give him his pills, which he loves. I am home to keep him company. He sleeps beside my knees at night and wakes me in the morning. But as much as I love him, I’m beginning to realize that we cannot care for him much longer.
Yesterday, the doctor noticed that his body had started resorbing his teeth. It’s related to his immune disorder. They see it in older cats, but Morpheus is barely 18 months old. The treatment is to start pulling his teeth.
And the news broke me. We can’t spend $600 a year on cat food and thousands more on vet bills and medicine and watch him continue to be sick. All this time, I was hoping we’d find the right combination of food and medicine and, with enough love, he would be a normal cat. But now I think that point has passed. It’s only a matter of time before he reacts to something and it kills him.
He’s been depressed this week, hiding under a blanket and sleeping the hours away. His teeth have hurt enough that he doesn’t eat like normal. He’s got two areas that he’s licked raw again. If the daily steroid cream doesn’t help him, we may be out of options.
I don’t know what to do. Would he be better off in another home, an only cat with another stay-at-home human to dote on him, someone who could afford monthly steroid shots? Should he go into kitty hospice? How long do we force him to stay in this world when he’s so allergic to it?
February 18, 2014
Win a copy of As Above, So Below
Goodreads Book Giveaway
As Above, So Below
by Loren Rhoads
Giveaway ends February 28, 2014.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
February 13, 2014
Praise for As Above, So Below
As Above, So Below
People have been saying nice things about my new novel, co-written with Brian Thomas.
“I waited for a decade to read the full story of the succubus Lorelei and the angel Aza after discovering a short story about their too-wrong-to-be-right love/lust in a magazine slush pile. Now, at last, that amazing story serves as simply the jump-off point to unveil a richly imagined supernatural battleground in this frighteningly evocative novel. If you loved the dark fantasy of Christopher Walken’s The Prophecy series, you’ll be entranced by this haunting story of forbidden desire that spans both heaven and hell.”
–John Everson, author of Nightwhere, Covenant, and Violet Eyes
“Fans of paranormal romance, urban fantasies, kick-ass fights, and some pretty damn hot sex, check out As Above, So Below, the new book by Loren Rhoads and Brian Thomas!”
–Dana Fredsti, author of Plague Town, Plague Nation, and the upcoming Plague World
The book is available from:
Amazon
Kindle
Nook
Black Bed Sheets Books
Stay tuned for a way to win a free copy of As Above, So Below from Goodreads!
February 1, 2014
Now I am a novelist
As Above, So Below
All my life, I’ve told stories. I asked for a typewriter as a birthday present in 8th grade, because I knew that real writers typed their manuscripts. All my friends in high school wrote stories. When I met my husband Mason, one of the sexiest things about him was that he had a computer in his dorm room (and played guitar — a double threat). There is nothing I have wanted so much in my life as to become a published novelist.
And now, thanks to Black Bed Sheet Books, I am.
As Above, So Below was written with Brian Thomas, who came up with the brilliant idea of a devil possessed by a mortal girl’s ghost. It’s the story of Lorelei, who sees an angel across a crowded bar and decides he’ll fall for her, no matter what she needs to do.
The novel includes “The Angel’s Lair,” previously published as a stand-alone story in Sins of the Sirens and features the protagonist from “Never Bargained for You,” which appeared in the Demon Lovers anthology.
You should be able to click on the picture and find the book on Amazon.
