Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 68
November 4, 2013
Reading the Haunted Mansion Project
It was so good to see my fellow Haunted Mansion Survivors yesterday. Almost the entire Bay Area contingent turned out, which was great.
Rain Graves opened the afternoon but talking about how she met the mansion and conceived the idea to bring horror writers together to explore it. Then she introduced me — and I introduced S. G. Browne, and things really got rolling.
I knew Scott’s work from Fated and Breathers, his satiric novels, so I was completely taken off-guard when he submitted a straight-up Lovecraftian horror story for the Haunted Mansion book. I got goosebumps as he read an excerpt of the story “Spooked.” Thank goodness nothing like that has happened to us in the mansion!
Fran Friel read “The Whispers of Chickens” next. I love that story because it absolutely refuses to go where you expect. Fran rocked her reading of it, which I hadn’t realized would be so complicated to perform.
Rain read her lovely poem “Ten Thousand Eyes,” which deserves to be its own video on the Haunted Mansion Retreat website. Her performance was perfect: intense and scary.
I finished up the reading part of the afternoon with an excerpt from “Here There Be Monsters.” Until I was preparing for the reading, I hadn’t considered how personal the story is, how much of my misspent youth it reveals.
I wish we could have included Kim Richards, William Gilchrist, and Dan Weidman in the reading, too, but Rain invited them up to stand with us during the Q&A part of the event. We got some great questions. I think we met some of the sacrifices, um, I mean, new people, who will come with us to the next Haunted Mansion Retreat.
You can keep up with preparations for the next retreat here.
I cleverly forgot to take any photos, but William shot some video, so I’ll link to that when he’s ready.
You can pick up your own copy of The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two at Borderlands Books on Valencia Street in San Francisco. They have some copies signed by all the contributors who were at the event yesterday.
November 3, 2013
Haunted Mansion Project reading this weekend!
Reblogged from Morbid is as Morbid does:
In Autumn 2012, 20 horror writers returned to a haunted house in Marin for a second writing retreat with ghosts. Contributors to the book The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two will read short stories and memoirs documenting the four days they spent together getting frightened and inspired. Readers will include Rain Graves (The Four Elements), S.G. Browne (
Just a final reminder: today's the day!
November 1, 2013
Meeting my goals
As usual, I tried to stuff too much into October. I planned to blog every day, but that morphed into trying to blog every day on both this Morbid blog and on Cemetery Travel, with occasional pieces on the Red Room blog. I managed 30 posts on CT, 28 on Morbid Is, and 7 on the Red Room, so I’m going to call that good enough. On the way, I went down to LA for the Death Salon and up to the Gold Country for my birthday — and my daughter had two weeks off from school. So 62 blog posts was ambitious from the start.
Another of my goals was to write 5 guest posts on 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, but it hasn’t gone live yet.
I set up three giveaways for Wish You Were Here, via the HWA blog, the Red Room, and GoodReads. I’m hoping the winners will like the book and talk it up to their friends, but you never know. Wish You Were Here got a book trailer and its first review in October, so that was great. The word is starting to get out about my baby.
And now I’m planning to dive into Nanowrimo. Mason’s on the sofa with a sore throat and it’s the last day of our daughter’s vacation, so I’m going to have to step away from the computer to do family stuff, but I’m excited about knocking a 50,000-word chunk out of the untitled Bay Area Cemeteries book. Yeah, it’s nonfiction, but the Association for Gravestone Studies conference is coming back to San Francisco in a couple of years, so I need to get the book done and find a publisher before then. This November is just the time to get it done.
My blogging may be sporadic from now til the end of the year, but thanks for spending so much of October with me. It’s been a real pleasure.
October 30, 2013
The Best Holiday of the Year
I grew up on a farm, a mile down the road from the farm where my dad lived as a child. My parents knew everyone “on the mile”: where they went to church, where they worked, whether they had kids. There were a lot of young families like my parents, who’d bought a couple of acres in the midst of farmland, built a ranch-style house, put down sod and planted trees.
Almost no one decorated for Halloween. The holiday was much less about scares, when I was a kid, and more about community. The emphasis was on giving. One farm wife made popcorn balls: carmelized popcorn shaped bigger than a fist and wrapped in cellophane. Because the apple orchard was farther down the road, homemade candy apples were popular gifts. One neighbor offered a mixing bowl full of pennies and encouraged each child to take a fistful. (This was when you could actually buy two pieces of Bazooka bubblegum for a penny.) Neighbors would invite you in to warm up with a cup of hot chocolate so they could get a good look at your costume.
Halloween seemed magical to me then. The neighborhood was a wonderland of houses with their porch lights on, inviting and friendly. We neighborhood kids traveled in packs, carrying brown paper grocery sacks or pillowcases. Our costumes were homemade and seldom p.c. — hoboes and cowboys and indian princesses, gypsies and soldiers — things made by hand by our mothers or pulled together from our parents’ closets. There were no racks of shiny rayon costumes at the sole grocery store in town.
Because I have such rosy memories of Halloween — before the scares of razorblades in apples and tabs of LSD given out as stickers (neither of which I took seriously until it was MY four-year-old going door-to-door) — it was hard to learn to take my daughter trick-or-treating. We don’t know our neighbors beyond the houses immediately adjacent. Porch lights are resolutely switched off in this neighborhood on Halloween, where the neighbors are more likely to celebrate Dia de los Muertoes or Qingming than Halloween. I knew that there were parts of town where parents dumped their kids by the van-load, but I wasn’t interested in being run down in the crush.
The first year we trick-or-treated only from the nurses in the hospice where my great aunt lay dying. The year my daughter was three, we only begged from places I shopped at on West Portal Avenue. We tried Potrero Hill the following year, but the neighbors were so besieged that they’d grown surly. Some just left bowls of candy on the steps and retreated, so they didn’t have to interact with the children at all.
The year she was five, we hit the jackpot. The neighbors of St. Francis Wood compete with each other, turning their yards into Oz, complete with Dorothy’s house atop the witch, or setting up a life-sized pirate ship, captained by a skeleton. Kids and adults all seemed to have a good time. My daughter was particularly impressed by the man doling out chocolate body parts, who gave her a blue eye because she was “such a pretty princess.”
After that, we spent a couple of years braving the Halloween crush because one of the families in her grave always hosted a Halloween party before the kids go out to trick-or-treat together. Those excursions have been among the most magical nights of her life. I always looked forward to recapturing the sense of community I felt as a child. It’s strange that I have to think beyond our neighborhood to do it.
This year her school sabotaged all that. They scheduled the class bonding camp over Halloween. Even though a full third of the parents protested, the school refused to reschedule the trip. Their only compromise was to offer an earlier return flight — families could pay more money for less camp — and have their children fly home on Halloween. Since the kids are flying in and out of a small airport, I figured the odds that their plane would be delayed were even on. Either way, we decided the only real protest was to keep our daughter home. Most other families caved and sent their children away. No one at all is happy; bonding is the last thing being accomplished.
This year we’ll go back to St. Francis Wood to trick-or-treat. There will only be the three of us, instead of a pack of children. There will be no one to trade candy with afterward, no classmates whose costume must be admired. The excitement will be muted.
Still, I think we made the right choice: to keep her home to enjoy Halloween, rather than send her off to let strangers enjoy her costume and provide Halloween fun. What’s Halloween without trick-or-treating? These kids are too young for ghost stories or haunted houses or scary movies. They’re too young for sexy costumes and awkward dances. What else can they do at this age, beyond trick-or-treat? For that matter, I feel like childhood is flying so fast and there won’t be too many more magical nights that she’ll want to share with her parents.
It makes me sad that the school chose to suck the fun out of Halloween this year.
October 29, 2013
Haunted Mansion Project reading this weekend!
In Autumn 2012, 20 horror writers returned to a haunted house in Marin for a second writing retreat with ghosts. Contributors to the book The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two will read short stories and memoirs documenting the four days they spent together getting frightened and inspired. Readers will include Rain Graves (The Four Elements), S.G. Browne (Lucky Bastard & Big Egos), Fran Friel (Mama’s Boy), and Loren Rhoads, formerly of Morbid Curiosity magazine.
November 3 at 3 p.m. FREE
Borderlands Cafe
870 Valencia Street (Between 19th and 20th)
San Francisco, CA 94110
Cafe phone #: 415-970-6698
Website: http://hauntedmansionwriters.blogspot.com/
October 28, 2013
Blogging Around
The cover of Wish You Were Here, with my photo of Hollywood Forever
Hey, in addition to the Wish You Were Here giveaway on Goodreads — which ends Thursday — I’m also giving away a copy of the Wish You Were Here ebook on the Horror Writers Association blog today. The blog is called Halloween Haunts this month and is full of writers talking about their Halloween memories and what else makes them tick. Lots of fun things are being given away! For the blog, I wrote about visiting Ray Bradbury’s grave on my birthday last year. At the bottom of the blog post are the directions for entering to win the ebook.
Also, I’m really proud of the post I wrote for CemeteryTravel today. It’s a collection of all the horror writers I’ve featured over the years on the cemetery blog. Ever wondered where the bodies are buried?
Last Friday I wrote about visiting Marilyn Monroe’s grave in the dark for my Red Room blog.
All this blogging has been fun, but I’m actually looking forward to starting Nanowrimo on Friday and settling down to write something longer than a blog post.
October 27, 2013
Wish You Were Here
Loren Rhoads
12.95
Western Legends Press, 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1484197271
We taphophiles don’t like to settle for armchair traveling, preferring to go adventuring on our own, but even we can use a good beach read (though from under the shade of an umbrella, as many of us do take pride in our common pallor). Loren Rhoads ‘ new book Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel is the perfect book to take along with you.
This is the the first review of Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel -- and a reminder that Wish You Were Here is being given away on Goodreads this week. Here's the link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
October 26, 2013
Requiem for Morbid Curiosity
The reading Saturday night was one of the best yet. I don’t know if I felt that way because I was so relaxed going in to it, or if it was the vibe of the haunted bookstore, but Karen turned down the lights, so the venue was nice and intimate. I felt completely at home.
RuthAnn Spike started us off with her tale of corresponding with a murderer, from Morbid Curiosity #9. The piece talks to the universality of curiosity and the way it drives some of us until we cross a line that frightens us back to the daylight. I was glad she volunteered to go first and state the theme of the evening.
Claudius Reich read “Back Roads,” the story about riding with the craziest mofo in Oklahoma. It contains one of the lines I’m proudest of publishing in the magazine: “Affronted, stung in the heart of my budding bohemian cred — no one but me and my friends had even heard of the bands we liked! I was my school’s acid dealer! I’d hung out with actual junkies! on the Lower East Side! — I politely demurred.” Wow. I love that story.
Allegra Lundyworf remembered Grandma Butterfly again and shared the story of the first Grandmarama. I don’t know how many times I’ve read that story — and I think I’ve heard her read it aloud three times — but I still had to blink back tears. I told myself sternly, “You are not going to cry and wreck your makeup! You’ve got three more readers to introduce!”
Lilah Wild recalled “Working in Luck,” her days advising customers in a magical shop. Every time I hear that story, it calls to mind Curios and Candles. How I miss that place! Lilah’s story brings the atmosphere vividly to life again.
Despite having to work late on a Saturday and traffic on the bridge, Seth Lindberg read “The Brother Who is Actually Okay.” I’ve asked Seth to read at three of the four local readings this year, but there’s a reason I chose that story to be first in the last issue of the magazine. Like RuthAnn’s, it touches on the heart of what it is to be human.
Jill Tracy closed the evening with “The Keeper of the Shop,” a sweet sad ghost story that remembers another San Francisco shop lost in time. I don’t even remember the name of the place, but I’ve always regretted that I didn’t buy the DIY crucifixion set while I had the chance. Unsurprisingly, Jill has such amazing stage presence that even the pause at the end, when she’d finished reading, was infused with emotion.
I had a wonderful time. The audience lingered after we’d finished, chatting comfortably amidst the halloween decorations and icons on the wall and all the old books.
I knew that night that the owner’s father was on his deathbed. She let me know yesterday that he died Saturday night, after the reading finished. I am amazed and grateful that she let us bring our Halloween show into her shop while she was dealing with so much herself.
Somehow, it makes it all that much dearer to me. I never thought I’d say this, but I am really going to miss hosting the Morbid Curiosity show. I loved hearing the contributors perform. That may be the hardest thing for me to give up now that Morbid Curiosity is dead.
October 25, 2013
Why I killed Morbid Curiosity
Timothy Renner’s lovely maiden.
In 2002, my younger brother died suddenly. He had been a secret alcoholic and, without anyone knowing, he destroyed his liver. I talked to him one Monday night, when his neck ached so much he couldn’t turn his head. By Thursday, he had died of liver failure.
I was 38. I don’t remember a time before I had a brother. It felt like I’d lost an arm, like an actual part of my body had been chopped off. I developed a goiter that felt as if it was choking me.
My dad had his first heart attack in 1992. The fall after my brother died, Dad was back in the hospital for more heart surgery. It was like the universe was sending me a clear message: if I wanted my child to know her family, I had to get busy. After a miserable pregnancy during which something in my body irreversibly broke, my daughter was born 7-1/2 weeks early.
Through it all, I continued to put out Morbid Curiosity. One issue’s editorial was about my brother’s death. The next was about my daughter’s birth. By issue #10, I was feeling the pressure to focus on my health, my work, and my family. I no longer had the patience to deal with the author who demanded more payment than anyone else was receiving for me to reprint her story that was already published on the web. When one of the new authors wanted to rewrite her essay as the magazine was going to the printer — then wanted to buy up published copies so she could slice her story from it rather than have people read it — I knew I’d made the right decision. I no longer had the emotional reserves to deal with the contributors.
Seven years later, there are things I still miss. There’s no pleasure like opening up a box of newly printed magazines and seeing them real and complete and black as can be. I miss sitting in the audience and hearing a story I’ve edited come to life in its author’s voice. I miss the letters from readers. I miss people cornering me to confess the morbid things they’ve done. I miss working with the authors to shape their essays into pieces that will stick in their readers’ minds and create an alchemy never before seen.
I don’t miss the drama that occurred constantly behind the scenes as I assembled each issue. I’ve long understood that if you ask people to tell you their deepest, darkest memories, you will get more than the words in their submission. I loved my contributors and still honor their experiences, but I lost my taste for the counseling and hand-holding that some of them needed from me. I was getting my drama at home.
I do miss editing, though. Putting together The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two whetted my appetite. I’ve been thinking about assembling a project next year, but I have a few more books of my own to get out of the way first. Luckily, Nanowrimo is coming up fast.
October 24, 2013
The Editor’s Children, part 3
When I got to Morbid Curiosity #10, I thought I’d already hit up all my friends for their deepest, darkest confessions.
That made it that much more poignant when Seth Lindberg sent me “The Brother Who is Actually Okay.” I’d known Seth for years, since back in the Gothic.Net days. We’d been in a writing group together and I admired the succinct way he could dissect a story. I’d read his fiction, but I wasn’t at all familiar with his nonfiction, so I hadn’t hit him up for an essay for Morbid Curiosity. I had no idea he’d grown up with a sister who was profoundly affected by Down’s Syndrome. There are so many levels to the story that the onion metaphor doesn’t go far enough. Seth manages to create empathy for all the members of his family in a beautiful, sad, deeply touching way. It made him a hard act to follow.
Bryan Marchese I knew because my husband had released some music by Bryan’s band Crash Worship back when we ran the Charnel Music label. Bryan and I had spoken at shows, but I probably couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. So I was amazed when he sent me “A Week in Hell” about living in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He was trained as a medic, so he did what he could to help people, but as his story unfolds, his words are incandescent with fury: at the feds, at the cops, at the looters. The tension spirals until you are so glad that Bryan finally escapes that you want to turn on all the lights and stand in front of the fridge just because you can. Which is not to trivialize the story at all: you just can’t help but be grateful for the things we take for granted every day.
Seth Flagsberg and I were in a writing class together. I knew he was a lawyer, but I had no idea he’d defended murderers until he sent me “Brain Salad Surgery,” about a man who’d killed his business partner with a ball-peen hammer — and saw absolutely nothing wrong with that. The solution Seth comes to makes perfect sense, but it’s impossible to see it coming.
The three essays could not have been more different, but they were among the best I ever published in the magazine. I could not have been prouder of being chosen to publish them.
I picked ”Brain Salad Surgery” to be reprinted in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, but the other two stories are only available in Morbid Curiosity #10. You can order your copy here.
