Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 66

Writing for Scoutie Girl

I’ve got a new travel writing gig.  I’ll be doing a monthly essay for Scoutie Girl, which is this great online magazine written entirely by women.  This is how they describe themselves:

“Scoutie Girl is a daily digital lifestyle magazine providing our readers with stories, philosophies, and innovative ideas about creative living and striving to be a better individual within your community. Here you can connect, converse, and begin a dialogue with other extraordinary people. Prepare to get inspired.”

I am so honored to become part of the team.  I’ll be writing about traveling with my daughter — and you can bet it will be morbid.  I don’t know any other way to travel.

My first story is about spending the night at the California Academy of Sciences: http://www.scoutiegirl.com/sleeping-with-the-fishes

Reading “The Shattered Rose”

I had no idea this video was up on youtube.  I knew Evan filmed me reading at the last Instant City event at Adobe Books, but if Francy hadn’t told me about the video on her radio show last night, I would’ve never known it had been posted.

This is an excerpt from “The Shattered Rose,” one of my Alondra stories.  It appeared in the most recent issue of Instant City magazine, the genre issue.

I’m on the radio tonight!

SUNDAY 1/19 @ 11 p.m. EST (8 p.m. PST) on FRANCY & FRIENDS!

Special two-hour edition! We welcome special guest horror writer Loren Rhoads of Morbid Curiosity magazine fame who, along with co-author Brian Thomas, is about to release their wicked demon-loves-angel novel AS ABOVE, SO BELOW from Black Bed Sheet Books.

ALSO, as a real treat, we welcome the authors of BLESSINGS FROM THE DARKNESS, the anthology sensation of the year in tribute to author Yvonne Mason and we’ll all have a real shindig with outstanding talent from Black Bed Sheet Books!

Join Francy, Nicholas Grabowsky, co-host Joe Flynn, actor John Link, surprise call-ins, and a plethora of rising authors as we chat fiction, writing, publishing, and taking over the industry!

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/francy/2014/01/20/horror-writer-loren-rhoads-plus-blessings-from-the-darkness

When the Experts are Wrong

The Mount Davidson cross, San Francisco, 2014

One of the local historians I really respect said in a lecture many years ago that he believed that the last cross to stand atop San Francisco’s Lone Mountain Cemetery was moved to the park at the top of Mount Davidson.  If that was the case, I wanted to hike up to it and take some pictures, since I’m documenting all the relics of the demolished historical cemeteries of San Francisco.

It was a gorgeous day yesterday.  The sky was flawless and the sun was warm enough to offset the humidity lingering from Saturday’s rain. I didn’t consult a map because I’ve been to the top of Mountain Davidson before, maybe 13 or 14 years ago. My husband parked at one of the stairways into the park and we began to climb.

And we climbed and climbed. The fitbit I wear said we climbed 56 flights of stairs before we were done.  The park is quite different than the other steep, grassy, treeless hills of San Francisco. Mount Davidson’s paths were muddy and vines choked the trees.  Ferns sprouted from the rocks. I’d forgotten how like a rainforest Mount Davidson is.

When we finally reached the crest, a plaque said the first Easter sunrise service had been celebrated at the cross in 1923. That would have been before Lone Mountain Cemetery was demolished in 1939. Another plaque said the cross was designed and built by George Kelham and inaugurated by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. I wondered if there had been more than one cross up there.

A little bit of poking around the internet reveals that the original Mount Davidson cross was made of wood. It was placed by the congregation of Grace Cathedral, which is Episcopalian. It burned down several times before the cement cross replaced it in 1934. The 103-foot cross was paid for by the Native Sons of the Golden West in memory of the early pioneers. No connection to Lone Mountain Cemetery at all.

I remember when San Franciscans voted in 1997 to sell the very top of Mount Davidson so that the city would no longer be responsible for a religious symbol in a public park. With church officially separated from state, the cross and its immediate surroundings were auctioned off.

The Council of Armenian American Organizations of Northern California purchased it for $26,000. The cross now stands as a monument to the 1.5 million Armenians killed by the Turks between 1915 and 1923. The California pioneers have been forgotten.

Easter morning services are still celebrated at the foot of the cross. The forest of eucalyptus and redwoods have grown up close to it, shadowing it even on a glorious day like yesterday. It might be hard to watch the sun rise from the cross, but the sense of peace, of separation from the city, would be undeniable.

I was disappointed that the cross doesn’t fit into my cemetery research, but it was a wonderful day for a walk.

Widgety

The Zero to Hero challenge for today was to add widgets to your blog design.  My blog was widget-heavy already, so I removed some and moved the others around. I don’t know if I’m happy with the layout yet.

I am open to any advice you can offer.  Are things too busy over there on the right?  Is there information you’re looking for that could be shifted up to the top of the column or something else that should be exiled to the bottom?

I always like the look of simple, striped down design: what I think of as classic Japanese or zen. My experience with modern-day Japanese apartments, though, is a jumble of things stuffed into too small a space. That pretty much describes my office — and I’m afraid it describes my blog as well.

Using Pinterest for Book Cover Design

When Black Bed Sheet Books was designing the cover of As Above, So Below — my first novel, written with Brian Thomas — they asked if we had any ideas for the cover image.  Brian would love to have a Coop image, but I knew there was no way we could afford that.

So I turned to Pinterest (which I love) and quickly created a board of succubus and angel images to give Nick some idea of the sort of things I like. (If you’re viewing this on WordPress or LorenRhoads.com, you can see the pinboard below.  Apparently, it doesn’t show up on mobile devices or if you’re reading via email.)

I couldn’t find exactly the image I wanted — one of an angel holding a devil girl — but Nick was pretty much able to read my mind.  He came up with this:

I like that their pose is tender.  I like his big feathery wings and the shadows of her batwings.  I like that although she is naked (which she is on and off throughout the book), she’s turned enough to be slightly modest.  That fits the book perfectly.

We’re in the final editorial stages of the book now.  With any luck, it should be out by the end of the month.

Zero to Hero Challenge

So WordPress is hosting this challenge to get people to think more deeply about their blogs, to experiment and have fun with the blogging process.  This blog is sort of my red-headed stepchild, the last one I think to update, so I’m going to participate in the challenge and drink all the inspiration from it that I can.

I joined the program in process yesterday.  The challenge for Day 1 was to Introduce Yourself by writing a “who I am and why I’m here” post.  That led to my manifesto yesterday.

I went ahead and did Day 2: What’s Your Name? as well.  Bloggers were encouraged to polish up the titles of their blogs or their taglines, but I’m happy with mine.  Both of them sum up what I want to do here pretty well.  We were also supposed to write text for an about the blog widget, but I wasn’t sure I needed one.  I mean, I’ve got the About.me widget and the Facebook widget and my About Me page and all the pages focusing on my work.  How much can I really expect anyone to read?  So I made a blurb from the especially nice quote Tom Roche wrote about me and called it good.

Day 3′s challenge was to write the post that you had in mind when you started the blog.  I’ve struggled with finding a topic since yesterday, without any luck.  I’m going to have to come back to that one.

The challenge for Day 4 was to Explore the Neighborhood by finding five new blogs to follow.  I already follow 80+ blogs and can barely keep up, so I’m looking to whittle down my list instead of add to it.  However, I did search for blogs tagged “cemetery” on WordPress and left a ton of comments.  Maybe that’s close enough to the spirit of the challenge.

For Day 5, we were encouraged to try out a bunch of new themes.  I went through hours of theme exploration when I set this blog up a year ago and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got.  I wanted the theme to echo the design of Cemetery Travel, allow me to customize the photo in the header, and give me the sidebar and footers to add widgets to.  For now I’m going to stand pat with the theme I’ve got.

Day 6′s challenge was to do something you’d never done before on your blog: add a video or a gif or embed tweets or tracks from Spotify.  I’ll do that one tomorrow.

Are you doing the Zero to Hero challenge? How’s it going for you?

If you’re interested in joining up now, you can click on the image above and be taken to the challenge’s home.

The Storyteller’s Manifesto

I started telling myself stories when I was little.  My mom (a 20-something ninth-grade English teacher with a brand-new house and two kids under 5) was a firm believer in naps and early bedtimes, so I filled the sleepless moments by spinning stories in my mind.

Marina, the mermaid from Stingray

My earliest stories were about being a mermaid, something I’ve yet to write about as an adult.  Instead, I’ve published stories about aliens from space, alchemy in Prague, vampires in San Francisco, post-apocalyptic Detroit, a succubus on the Sunset Strip, and a fox spirit in Tokyo, among other things.  All of them spun out of those earliest tales that bloomed behind my closed eyelids on a farm in Michigan.

I continue to be fascinated by travel and magic, fairytales and cemeteries, adventures and analyses.  I believe the most important human characteristic is curiosity. I believe there are no stupid questions, but if you think about a lot of things, you will find the answers without needing to ask anyone else. I believe you have the right to believe anything you like, as long as you don’t require me to share your beliefs.  I believe in the power of being polite, because it confuses people who would dislike you on sight otherwise. I believe we are here to love.

I started this Morbid Is as Morbid Does blog last January because I have been blogging for a long time and needed a real home.  I started on Livejournal 10 years ago this coming March.  I’ve blogged at the Red Room since January 2008.  My Cemetery Travel blog started on February 1, 2011. All of those had/have a sense of community that I adored, but I felt limited by the topics I chose to talk about through them.

The Temple of Zeus at Olympia

This blog will, I hope, blend together everything that fascinates me.  There will be a lot of talk about writing — mine and others — and a lot of consideration about what supports and encourages creativity in the world.  I want a place to think — and I want to hear your thoughts, too.  What are you curious about?  What do you like to read?  What makes you want to tell stories?

We’re all in this world together.  We’re all going to die someday.  Let’s make our time here magical.

Morbid Is as Morbid Does: 2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,900 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 48 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Never Enough, 2013

Every year I recap the writing triumphs and disappointments of the previous twelve months and every year I feel like it’s never enough.  2013 might be the first year I was satisfied.

Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel came out from Western Legends Press in May.  Publisher John Palisano was hugely supportive, soliciting my input on the interior design, using one of my photos for the cover, and making me feel like the luckiest writer ever.  The book includes 35 essays, all revised for this collection, and some published in their entirety for the first time. I could not be prouder of this book.

Just before the 2012 Haunted Mansion Retreat, Rain Graves asked if I’d step into E. S. Magill’s formidable shoes and edit the second volume of The Haunted Mansion Project. It was my first time editing fiction by professionals, which made it a huge amount of fun.  The book came out in June, just in time for the World Horror Convention in New Orleans.  I love how it turned out. Totally worth the PTSD I suffered while reliving the last retreat over and over!

In May, I signed a contract with Renaissance eBooks for This Morbid Life, a collection of my morbid memoir essays.  Here’s the back cover text: “From posing for prom pictures in a cemetery to getting high with a friend dying of AIDS, from eating bugs at the science museum to chasing and being chased by ghosts, from cross-dressing as her best friend to the premature birth of her daughter, This Morbid Life is a record of how one woman’s morbid curiosity made her life totally worth living. Loren’s morbid life encompasses adventures in a cadaver lab, in the piercing salon, and in her own backyard jungle.”  Most of the essays have been previously published in places like the book Sex Toy Tales, the magazines Unzipped, Morbid Curiosity, Zine World, and online at Gothic.Net and Jane.

In August, I signed a contract with Black Bed Sheet Books for As Above, So Below, my first novel, co-written with Brian Thomas.  It’s publication is immanent, so stay tuned.

Angel McCoy invited me to guest edit Wily Writers again. I chose two wonderful urban fantasy stories, but they haven’t been published yet.  I can’t wait to see them in print.

I did three huge interviews this year about CemeteryTravel.com.  The first was for the Weather Channel and the second for the venerable trade journal American Cemetery. The third will be part of Lynn Morgan’s amazing book Post-Graduate Goth. I’m really looking forward to seeing that one published.

One of my goals for October was to write guest posts for other people’s blogs.  I’m proud of the pieces I managed to place:

* My piece about visiting Ray Bradbury’s grave on the HWA’s Halloween Haunts blog.

* My essay about the last Haunted Mansion Retreat on Armand Rosamilia’s blog.

* Jennifer Brozek invited me to talk about Wish You Were Here.

* I wrote my first entry for Atlas Obscura, too. It’s about the U.S. Marine Hospital Cemetery in San Francisco.

In terms of readings:

* I was honored to read part of “A Curiosity of Shadows” for the Haunted Mansion Project at World Horror in New Orleans, alongside Rena Mason, E.S. Magill, Angel McCoy, and Sephera Giron.

* I co-hosted the Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two reading at Borderlands Cafe, with Rain Graves, Fran Friel, and S.G. Browne.

* I was invited to read “The Shattered Rose” for the long-awaited genre issue of Instant City at the last event in the old Adobe Books space in the Mission. No one can rock a mic like Trent Tano, Alia Volz, and Alvin Orloff.

* The highlight, though, was reading part of “San Francisco: Crimes Seen” at the Obscura Society SF Salon: Vice, Crime & Vigilantes in the City by the Bay.

I only did one radio show this year, but it was DJ Lilycat’s show on FCC Free Radio.  You can listen to us talking about San Francisco history and cemeteries here.

Finally, in terms of blogging, I finally took down my old livejournal.  I wasn’t good about keeping up the Red Room blog, only managing 23 posts this year.  After I started this Morbid is as Morbid Does blog, I achieved 88 posts (some of my favorites are the interviews with the contributors to the Haunted Mansion Project). Cemetery Travel hit 92 posts this year and crossed the line into 70,000 page views. And I started the Cemetery Postcards tumblr in December.

I’ve got some good stuff coming up, too.  I won’t announce it until the ink is dry, but while this may have been my best year ever, the years to come promise to be even better.