Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 74
July 9, 2013
The Haunted Mansion interviews: Lisa Morton, Resident Skeptic
Lisa Morton joined the Haunted Mansion Writer’s Retreat for the first time in 2012. She is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of books and magazines, including Danse Macabre, Blood Lite III, The Mammoth Book of Psycho Stories, and Cemetery Dance. In 2010, her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, was published to critical acclaim, appearing on numerous “Best of the Year” lists. Her second novel, Malediction, will be released in October 2013. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at http://www.lisamorton.com. You can also catch her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/lisa.morton.165.
Q: Had you ever had a paranormal experience before you came to the Haunted Mansion?
LM: No. Have things happened to me that were odd or seemingly inexplicable? Yes, as they have to everybody…but I’m a confirmed skeptic and have yet to see any proof of the existence of paranormal or supernatural activities or entities.
Q: Did anything spooky happen to you at the Mansion?
LM: The only spooky thing that happened to me at the Mansion was being zapped with a horrible flu bug. Otherwise…I’m a fan of architecture, so I was interested in the Mansion and its history for probably somewhat different reasons from everyone else. I found it a tremendously beautiful and peaceful place. Great for writing, in other words!
Q: What inspired the piece you wrote for The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two?
LM: Hearing some of my fellow attendees say they felt as if they’d been touched while they’d been in their beds. I don’t personally believe they experienced anything supernatural…but the fiction side of me started to wonder: If ghosts were real, why would they touch someone? Would they be desperate to make some sort of connection—and would they seek out a living person who is equally desperate? My story “Coming to Day” is about an unhappy trophy wife who has such an experience at (a thinly fictionalized version of) the Mansion, and how the experience changes her.
Lisa at work in the Mansion’s common room. Photo by Loren Rhoads.
Q: Do you expect to come back to the next Haunted Mansion Retreat in 2015?
LM: I really want to. Even with a 102-degree fever, I loved my four days at the Mansion! It’d be wonderful to experience it again in a healthy state.
Q: What’s coming up for you next writing-wise?
LM: I have a ridiculous number of books coming out this fall: two novellas (Smog and Summer’s End, both from JournalStone), the paperback reprint of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween from Reaktion Books, and my second novel, Malediction, from Evil Jester Press. I’m currently under contract to deliver a tie-in novel to the Stephen Jones-edited Zombie Apocalypse anthology series, and after that I’ll be doing a new nonfiction book for Reaktion Books, which is—no irony intended!—a cultural history of ghosts.
Information on the 2015 Haunted Mansion Writer’s Retreat: http://hauntedmansionwriters.blogspot.com/2013/06/official-dates-for-haunted-mansion.html
July 8, 2013
The Haunted Mansion interviews: Nichole Boscia of GhostGirls
In her teen years, Nichole Boscia had a firsthand encounter with the paranormal that made a lifetime impression and led her to search the unexplained. She has run a paranormal investigation group called GhostGirls in Northern California since 2009. She currently works at NASA Ames Research Center as a senior technical engineer. During her fourteen years at NASA, she has published several technical papers in her field.
Nikki contributed reports on the GhostGirls’ investigations of the Haunted Mansion to both The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One and to Year Two.
Q: Had you ever had a paranormal experience before you came to the Haunted Mansion?
NB: I’ve had a lot of paranormal experiences during our investigations, which have covered a variety of locations from navy ships to asylums to historic parks. However, the most memorable experience I had was my first one, when I was a young teenager back home in rural Pennsylvania.
I was home alone, typing up a report for school on a classic typewriter, before I went downstairs to do laundry. While I was folding clothes, I heard the front screen door open and close a few times. Shortly afterward, I heard footsteps right above my head, creaking across the floor to the area where I had just been doing my homework. I hear someone typing on the typewriter. It was the rhythmic that is easily identifiable as a real person typing something, not random keys being hit.
I considered peeking up the stairs to see who was there, but I had an overwhelming feeling of dread and felt I had to get out of there. I grabbed scissors, ran outside, and hid for hours until my parents came home.
When they did, we saw that not only was the screen door locked, but the front door was also closed and locked. It could not have opened. Nothing appeared on the typewriter, either, but to me, there was no question as to whether or not someone had been in the house.
GhostGirls investigation of the Haunted Mansion, photographed by Lisa Morton.
Q: Did anything spooky happen to you at the Mansion?
NB: Two spooky events stand out in my mind. First was hearing an EVP with the voice recorder that allows us to listen live. It caught me off-guard because it was very loud and right into the microphone. No one else in the room heard anything, so we knew it was an EVP and not a disembodied voice. Second, I got very lightheaded, dizzy, and weak suddenly in one of the third-floor bedrooms. As I tried to leave the room, I collapsed from lack of strength. After I was out, I recovered fairly quick and felt normal again. We captured some very unpleasant EVPs in that room.
Q: Do you expect to come back to the next Haunted Mansion Retreat in 2015?
NB: Yes, definitely! We know the spirits there now pretty well; it almost feels like visiting old friends.
How you can keep up with the investigations of the GhostGirls:
The GhostGirls homepage: http://ghostgirls.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/GhostGirls/208084055886844
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/gh0stgirls
Information on the 2015 Haunted Mansion Writer’s Retreat: http://hauntedmansionwriters.blogspot.com/2013/06/official-dates-for-haunted-mansion.html
July 3, 2013
The Haunted Mansion interviews: Sephera Giron
Photo by Lisa Morton
Sèphera Girón is an award-winning author with over 17 published books under her belt. She’s an accomplished tarot reader and invites you to watch her free monthly horoscopes on YouTube. Sèphera is mom to two adult sons. Paranormal investigations are Sèphera’s latest hobby, which she combines with tarot reading and a host of equipment. Most of Sèphera’s published work is available in eBook form and can be found at Smashwords.com and Amazon.com.
Sephera is one of the founding members of the Haunted Mansion Writer’s Retreat. She’s been a prolific contributor to the Haunted Mansion Project, with two pieces in each book.
Q: Had you ever had a paranormal experience before you came to the Haunted Mansion?
Sèphera Girón: Yes. Paranormal investigations are an activity I’ve come to late in life. It’s possible that, combined with a vivid imagination, I’ve had dozens of paranormal experiences. The lines between dreams, visions, imagination, and reality blurred for me as a child. As a tarot reader, that skill comes in handy, though I can’t always call upon it at will.
What I count as my first paranormal investigation activities occurred when I visited the Lizzie Borden house for the first time around a decade ago when I was in my forties.
With my two preteen sons, I drove from Toronto to Montreal to visit Nancy Kilpatrick, then drove on to Maine. I visited my parents and relatives in Maine, left the kids there and went to Salem, Massachusetts for a few hours. Once I left Salem, I was stuck in traffic around Boston. Just when traffic picked up again, my transmission blew out. Oh, the terror in my heart when I saw that transmission cap dancing on the highway in my rearview mirror.
How incredibly weird and wonderful that—even though I had lost all power—there was an exit right there! I turned my wheel right and glided down a ramp until I rolled right into a gas station driveway. I did not own a cell phone. I was a woman alone in New England, yet I found help.
My car had broken down on the way to a horror writers’ convention called Necon in Rhode Island. CAA towed me to Necon.
Long story short, I was trapped in Rhode Island during tall ship weekend and needed a new transmission. It would be days before the part would come in. When the con was over, Lisa Mannetti convinced me that I should go with a group of people who were staying over at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast. I thought, why not? I didn’t believe for a second it was haunted. The only thing I knew about the Borden case was the nursery rhyme. I’d never seen the movies or really paid it much mind at all.
From the moment I walked over the threshold, a distinct thickness embraced me. It was frightening. My guts were churning. My mind seemed to click into another level where vibrations were a thick curtain and I could follow the threads. As we walked around the house, I peered into rooms. New England gloominess added to my paranoia.
On the third floor, facing a door, I sensed children. Later on, I learned that children were drowned in the well next door by one of Lizzie’s relatives who suffered postpartum depression. She killed herself, too.
It seems, in the number of times I’ve visited the house over the years, that I am most in tune with the children, Andrew Borden, and now Michael the handyman, who died in recent years. I don’t consider myself psychic by any stretch of the imagination. When I read tarot cards, I just read the symbols and am just as amazed as you are at how accurate they are.
Something about the electromagnetic energy at the Borden home, likely combined with the New England muggy summers and the dense ocean air, lends itself to spooky experiences and psychic connections. There has been speculation that the house or location itself is some kind of a portal, which is why there are so many other spirits in the home unrelated to the Bordens.
There are other places where I have flashes of connections. So I’ve delved a little deeper into paranormal investigations and have gone on outings with a local group here called P.I.S.T.
I always wondered about that first trip: How my car blew up in a foreign country, yet I was safe. How it seemed to be destiny that I would spend the night at Lizzie Borden’s House and have since become somewhat authoritative on the subject.
Q. Did anything spooky happen to you at the Mansion?
SG: The Black Mass is still the most frightening experience for me. I’m afraid of the dark, which is why I sleep with the TV on—and have since I was 22 years old. I don’t like what happens in the dark. The fact that Rain Graves and I both saw the Black Mass and experienced it every night has reaffirmed that fear. You can check out the Black Mass when the Ghost Girls caught it here: http://hauntedmansionwriters.blogspot.ca/2010/10/mysterious-black-mass.html
Q: What inspired the pieces you wrote for the books?
Sephera’s photo of the monitors in the Haunted Mansion.
I have four pieces, two in each book.
For The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One, I kept a journal covering various ideas. The piece was published as “Notes from the Haunted Mansion.” I wrote a story called “The Third Room” based on a paranormal investigator who is drawn to a particular room in the Mansion. In addition, I was intrigued by the overgrown pond in the back, which once served as a swimming pool, complete with diving boards. I thought about what party guests might have been like in the Sixties, artists and poets, swingers and hippies. I wondered what ghosts haunted the Mansion, since there were so many interesting eras that had passed through. My story took on an echo of the type of story that might be in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents Terror Tales or something like that. It was great fun to write.
In The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two, I wrote about how I can finally hear most paranormal evidence. I used to have difficulty hearing it. However, with the help of Nikki of the GhostGirls, I kept listening and fiddling and ultimately have mastered it as best that I can with limited technology and my hearing loss from Who concerts. (Editor’s note: That how-to essay on EVPS is called “Do You Hear What I Hear?”)
I was going to write about the children at the Mansion. Between the time of the two Mansion retreats, the Ghost Girls had been sifting through evidence and posting findings, which you can find at http://ghost-girls.org/ under Mill Valley Mansion evidence. The first visit has EVPs of children talking when Rainy and I are sleeping. While we slept and dreamed of the Black Mass, we had no idea kids were in the room. At any rate, I wanted to wait to write the story and see what more I can discover about the children by the next visit. So I chose to write a poem instead. I’ve been working on a poetry collection over the past year, so I was in the mood to write a poem. “A Weekend at a Haunted Writers Retreat” is a reflection on how I see the Mansion and what I experienced over both years.
Q: Do you expect to come back to the next Haunted Mansion Retreat in 2015?
SG: Most definitely. It’s an excellent writing retreat. There’s a huge open living room. It’s cavernous. We call it the safe zone and everyone writes there at night. During the day, people spread across the property. Some may be in nooks and crannies; some may work in the meditation garden or at the “sacrificial altar.” The sound of the laptops clicking is great. There’s Wi-Fi there, too, so you can blog live or go on Facebook.
Sephera reading tarot with Diane of the GhostGirls. Photo by Nichole Boscia.
I performed a tarot reading at the altar for one of the guests and the energy was superb. I enjoy the ghost hunting aspect of the retreats, too, working with the Ghost Girls by performing tarot readings while they use other equipment to capture any responses.
Q: What’s coming up for you next writing-wise?
I’m working on a novella called SEX, LIES, and MONSTERS and a novel called WE ALL SCREAM. I’ve recently released a book from Scarlett Publishing that contains a collection of my early work called WEIRD TALES OF TERROR Volume 1. It contains several very early stories: some published, some not, some that were supposed to be published but the venues folded. The story “Release” was recommended for a Bram Stoker Award way back in the Nineties. The book also contains my novel THE WITCH’S FIELD that I penned in 1992.
You can follow Sephera all over the web at:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sephera
Free monthly horoscopes: http://www.youtube.com/sephera
Tarot Paths: http://tarotpaths.blogspot.ca
Her Sephera’s World blog: http://sephwriter666.blogspot.ca
Homepage: http://sepheragiron.com
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/sephera888/boards/
The Haunted Mansion Retreat blog: http://hauntedmansionwriters.blogspot.com/
July 2, 2013
The Haunted Mansion interviews: Rain Graves
After yesterday’s introduction, it makes the most sense to start off this series of interviews with the contributors to the Haunted Mansion Projects with the woman who started it all off.
Rain Graves is an armed fictionist at large. Publishers Weekly described her work in Barfodder (Cemetery Dance, 2009) as “Bukowski meets Lovecraft,” and she is a Bram Stoker Award winning poet (2002). Her latest book, The Four Elements (Bad Moon Books, 2013), is written with Charlee Jacob, Linda Addison, and Marge Simon. Some of her short fiction can be found in Zombies vs. Robots: Women on War! (IDW, 2012), Tales from the House Band 2 (PlusOnePress, 2012), and High Stakes (Evil Jester Press, 2013). She is the hostess of The Haunted Mansion Writer’s Retreat.
In The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One, Rain wrote an introduction to the book, a poem, a short story, and her “Journal of a Paranormal Mind,” which collected the running posts she wrote for the group blog we kept during the first retreat. She reprised all these contributions, simply swapping an afterword for her introduction for The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two.
Q: How did the idea for the Haunted Mansion Retreat occur to you?
RG: I was working in the Mansion back in 2009 and had some experiences there that left me wanting more. First I saw a full-bodied apparition of a maid dressed in Edwardian clothing manifest in front of me. Later, one of the staff members was with me making up the guest rooms on the 2nd floor, about 20 beds. Just as soon as we replaced the extra clean linens in the closet down the hall, we walked back through the rooms—and every single bed had been messed up, as if someone came along and threw the covers halfway down on each one. I also noticed strange smells I couldn’t explain: beeswax candles on the second floor landing, where no candles were kept or burned. And there was being touched. My ear was touched at the same time another girl’s ponytail was pulled.
I kept thinking that, as a horror writer, the ultimate experience would be spending a weekend retreat in that house, and writing about my experiences…but I didn’t want to do that alone. I wanted plenty of friends with me! So I mulled it over, and put the idea out there to the folks I normally see at conventions and good friends. People liked the idea, so we had our first retreat in 2010.
Q: Had you ever had a paranormal experience before you came to the Haunted Mansion?
RG: Yes, many times. As far back as I can remember, I have seen and heard spirits.
Q: Did anything spooky happen to you at the Mansion during the retreats?
RG: Yes. The first retreat, Sephera and I had a terrible time in a tiny little room at the end of the hall on the second floor. I don’t think we slept much in 2010… We kept experiencing icy cold spots, followed by seeing a giant, opaque black mass, which was also caught on infrared video at one point. But that wasn’t the spookiest thing. The spookiest thing was a disembodied voice whispering the word “God” in my ear, twice.
2012 had its own set of scary things. Our friend Dan had a harrowing experience after ”letting in” an entity that had been following him around. We got rid of it, but I think it shook everyone up to see an over-six-feet-tall man of Dan’s size and stature being dragged under a bed by something we could not see. Had we not gotten rid of the thing in the appropriate ways, it could have attached itself to Dan permanently.
Q: What inspired the pieces you wrote for The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two?
RG: The experience with Dan. The feeling and knowledge that something can come from nothing and haunt you forever: that made me think what it would be like to be an entity trapped in time, waiting for its chance of being free. I thought of the location of the Mansion being up a mountain and the Hall of the Mountain King. That was my inspiration for “Underneath the Ravens.”
Similarly, the poem “Ten Thousand Eyes” came from that dark place Dan went and his description of feeling thousands of eyes upon him outside the house. It came from the forest…and that’s also where the words for the poem seemed to find me.
Rain leads the Welcome Tour in 2012. Photo by Sephera Giron.
Q: What do you hope will happen when you come back to the next Haunted Mansion Retreat in 2015?
RG: I hope that all the knowledge that we gained from the scientific investigations Nikki and the GhostGirls have helped produce will help us communicate better with the spirits that are there. I’d like to eventually understand the mystery of Gretchen and the mean, bossy ghost that seems to try to control them all and what they do. It’s clear the ghosts are trying to reach out to us, because we get intelligent responses to our questions. Understanding who they were and where they are now would be paramount. It might help us to understand why there are so many of them in that place, too.
Q: What’s coming up for you next writing-wise?
RG: I’m working on a few little projects and things for anthologies, but the next big project will be a book of poetry based on gods and goddesses. I can say no more than that!
You can keep up with Rain here:
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/raingraves
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/raingraves
Homepage: http://www.raingraves.com
Haunted Mansion Writer’s Retreat: http://hauntedmansionwriters.blogspot.com
July 1, 2013
The Haunted Mansion blog tour begins
Last August, I was approached by the mastermind of the Haunted Mansion Retreat, Rain Graves, and invited to serve as editor for The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two. The book would collect nonfiction, short stories, and poetry inspired by the 4 days 17 writers and artists would spend in the Mansion in September 2013.
Of course I said yes. I love ghost stories more than any other breed of horror story. I had been thrilled to have my work appear in The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One, edited by E.S. Magill. She’d done the hard work of organizing the first book in a coherent way that added power to the stories as they built on each other. All I had to do would be follow in her footsteps and work with professionals like S.G. Browne, Sephera Giron, Stacey Graham, Angel Leigh McCoy, Lisa Morton, Yvonne Navarro, Weston Ochse, and more. Piece of cake!
I am so proud of how the book turned out. It debuted on June 13, at the World Horror Convention in New Orleans. On June 14, a bunch of the contributors gave a vertical tasting of the book, reading 5-minute snippets of their work. The event was a shivery success.
Before the convention, I’d had a brainstorm: I could interview the contributors to the book here on my blog. They’d have a chance to talk about what influenced their contributions to The Haunted Mansion Project – and I could sate my curiosity about their experiences (supernatural or inspirational) at the Mansion last year.
The biannual Haunted Mansion Retreat is going to skip next year, but will return in September 2015. Registration is already open, although limited to 30 people, so we don’t overwhelm the spookiness of the Mansion. Some of the Survivors have already signed up for their third go-round with the ghosts. You can check out the details here.
Tune in tomorrow for the first of my interviews. In the following days, we’ll hear from Rain Graves, Sephera Giron, E.S. Magill, Rena Mason, Lisa Morton, Kim Richards, and the leader of the GhostGirls paranormal investigation team, Nichole Boscia — and the rest of the Haunted Mansion Survivors.
June 24, 2013
The Haunted Mansion Project debuts
One of the highlights of the World Horror Convention for me was the The Haunted Mansion Project reading on Friday night. Kim Richards — mistress of Damnation Books, publisher of the Haunted Mansion Project: Year One and Year Two, and contributor to both volumes — served as emcee. William Gilchrist — new to the Mansion last year and now a published poet because of it — served to keep us all on time. In 30 minutes, five contributors read the scariest bits of their ghost-inspired work.
E. S. Magill opened the evening by reading the entirety of her essay “See Anything?” about the horrific paranormal experience she had as a child. I could hear the shivers run through the audience.
Sephera Giron read “A Weekend at a Haunted Writers Retreat,” a poem that managed to condense four days of camaraderie and terror into three brief pages. The poem sparkles with so many real events that reflect from the stories that follow.
Angel Leigh McCoy read the suspenseful bit of her story “Purgatory,” the calm right before all hell breaks lose. I heard the audience catch their breath — and the disappointment when time ran out and Angel had to stop. I knew right then that she’d sold some books. People would have to find out what was going to happen next.
I went next, reading the part where the shadows gather at the beginning of the seance from “A Curiosity of Shadows,” which appeared in the first Haunted Mansion book. I’m so proud of that story.
Then Rena Mason brought us back to the current volume with an excerpt of “awk*ward.” Wow, I love that story. And she chose the perfect excerpt to read, the bit where the sister’s ghost is creeping in with the fog. I don’t know who could resist discovering what happens next.
Personally, I was blown away to share the podium with so much talent. It was my honor to edit The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two, but I honestly cannot wait to hear what other people think of the book. I’ve lived with it for six months, but now that it’s loose in the world, the terror can spread.
I can’t wait to see the shivers!
You can order your own copy of the Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two or Year One from Amazon.
June 23, 2013
June 20, 2013
Swamp Tour
Jean Lafitte Historic Park
We stepped out of the van into the heat. The air was alive with the songs of insects: cicadas, grasshoppers, flies whining through the air. We covered our exposed flesh with bug spray as a woman hustled off the trail. ”The yellow flies are biting,” she said, rushing into her car.
I was amazed that a woman would walk alone in a swamp — but she wasn’t the last that we saw.
My daughter stopped along the trail to look at every bug. She found fuzzy black caterpillars, orange ones, even a pale blond one. Stoo warned her not to touch anything. In the swamp, even the caterpillars bite.
She found a tiny frog with yellow racing stripes. He was still there later, when we returned along the path, so she nudged him with a leaf. His leap was a thing of beauty, an effortless arc that carried him away into the poison ivy.
Alligator trail
The first alligator we saw might have been a log with eyes floating in a pool of shadow. I didn’t bother to photograph it, since I wasn’t sure I’d be able to see it later. Later I saw a trail of grass mashed down as something very large and low to the ground dragged itself under the boardwalk. Stoo warned us not to stray, that things lived under the boards during the heat of the day.
Once we began to study the few open pools of water, we found other alligators watching us. When Stoo was in high school, he used to ride his bike to the Algier ferry, then ride along the levees to the swamp, where he’d rent a canoe. I was nervous enough just walking through the swamp; I couldn’t imagine riding through it in a boat, on a level with the gators and cottonmouths and leeches.
Watchful gator
We passed a group of little kids — ages five to seven — on a field trip from camp. The chaperone said that one of the gators had come right out of the water at them. It was enough for me that they watched us. My daughter sat on the steps over the water, communing with one of the gators. She wanted to see him come up on the bank below her. For his part, he seemed content to watch her, in case she dropped something good to eat.
We returned along the same path, checking in with the same gators. We saw some swimming, but none basking on the shores. None, anyway, that we couldn’t be sure weren’t actually logs. Then we reached the pool where a gator named Smiley lived.
Smiley
Smiley was born with a misaligned jaw. She couldn’t really snap her jaws closed, which prevents her from eating big prey. Instead, she strained minnows from her pool. Stoo said she was much smaller than she should be for her age, because she couldn’t really feed herself.
After we passed Smiley’s pool, something large crashed through the brush behind us. Stoo and my daughter went racing back, hoping to see a deer or a nutria. Instead, Smiley had rushed out of the water after us. I couldn’t get my camera up in time to capture her because I was busy shouting for my daughter to move back. The alligator stood two feet away from her, mouth full of snaggle teeth.
Smiley’s tail disappearing beneath the boardwalk
I am thrilled that we got to walk in the swamp, that we were blessed to have seen so much wildlife. Even though we didn’t see the monster alligator who dragged himself through the grass, we saw plenty of the beasts going about their daily lives, chasing turtles and fish. We saw cardinals and finches flitting through the trees. Black or orange butterflies danced on the breezes, echoed by dragonflies in shades of fire and grass. I got bitten by flies, big, stinging bites that swelled and burned. Sweat slicked my throat. Sun burned my arms. I got a sense of how Jean Lafitte and his pirates used to live — and I realized that I never, ever wanted to spend the night walking in the swamp.
I’m glad this treasure exists. I’m startled that people treat it so casually that they walk alone there or take little kids there. I’m sad that someone has been feeding Smiley, so that she’s losing her fear of humans. That can only end badly.
And I’m grateful to Stoo for showing us this wonder.
June 10, 2013
World Horror in New Orleans!
Coming to New Orleans!
Just a few more days until the World Horror Convention opens in New Orleans! I cannot wait to go back. I haven’t been to New Orleans since Halloween 1999.
Here is my schedule for WHC2013. I haven’t penciled in the cemetery tours yet, but I’d like to get out to St. Roch’s and Greenwood, at least. You may be able to find me in the Dealers’ Room at the Black Bed Sheet table. We have some good news to announce.
THURSDAY:
8:00 PM
Drinks with the contributors to the Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two in the Carousel Bar
I’m so looking forward to catching up with my HMP homegirls and seeing the book in person!
FRIDAY
I’m attending the Marketing Yourself panel in the morning, but then I’m free all afternoon. Anyone want to catch an early dinner?
6:30-7 PM
Haunted Mansion Project reading
Come get a taste of the Haunted Mansion Project’s first two anthologies! Featuring Loren Rhoads, Sephera Giron, Rena Mason, Eunice Magill, and Angel Leigh McCoy. Moderated by Kim Richardson.
7-8 PM
Mass Autograph Signing
Books I’ll have to sign:
1. WISH YOU WERE HERE: ADVENTURES IN CEMETERY TRAVEL (Western Legends Press – New release!)
2. THE HAUNTED MANSION PROJECT: YEAR TWO (Damnation Books – New release!)
3. SINS OF THE SIRENS: 14 TALES OF DARK DESIRE (Dark Arts)
4. MORBID CURIOSITY CURES THE BLUES: TRUE STORIES OF THE UNSAVORY, UNWISE, UNORTHODOX, AND UNUSUAL (Scribner)
5. The CEMETERY TRAVELS NOTEBOOK.
ETA: You do not need to have a membership at the convention to come in and get your books signed. Come on in and say hello!
SATURDAY
11:00 AM
The Art of the Collection panel – Lisa Morton (moderating), Mort Castle, Derek Clendening, Stephen Dedman, and me
We’ll explore the purpose of single-author collections and how one can do them well.
Then, barring pitch sessions, I’m free until the Stoker Banquet.
SUNDAY
St. Roch’s Cemetery is open from 9-12.
Greenwood is open from 8:30-4:30.
It’s supposed to hit 90, so I think it’s going to be a good day for an early start.
