What’s your one line pitch or teaser for the book? Grab a reader’s attention with one line.
"What others have called an obsession with death is really a desperate romance with life."
Tell readers a little about your main character or characters?
This Morbid Life is a memoir, so the main character is me! I grew up on a small-town farm, pretty much surrounded by sex and death. Once I moved to San Francisco, I took every opportunity I could to explore them both.
Where do you like to write? Do you have an office or writing nook?
I have a converted breakfast nook with a built-in desk. It's tiny and doesn't have a door, so there's no privacy, but it's all mine. I love it.
What is one of your best marketing tips for other authors?
Reach out to the writers you know and ask them to help you spread the word when you have a new book coming out. Do the same for them. That way, you can combine your audiences and benefit each other.
What websites or tools have you found that offer the best results?
I have been having lots of fun playing with Book Brush. It allows me to make a different graphic for every place I guest blog, along with social media headers, animated advertisements, and more. I don't have any graphic design skills, so it's been a great relief to be able to produce all that stuff easily.
Any advice for aspiring writers?
If you're writing stories that you love, you're living your best life. Don't give up. I sold my first book to Scribner in 2008, more than 20 years after I took creative writing classes in college. I spent the time in-between taking more writing classes, going to conferences, meeting other writers, selling short stories, and living the sort of life that I could write about. There's always more to learn and nothing you write is ever wasted. Keep at it.
No Rest for the Morbid
Book One
Loren Rhoads
Genre: Non-Fiction/Memoir/Horror
Publisher: Automatism Press
Date of Publication: August 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7351876-2-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-7351876-3-1 (ebook)
ASIN: B09C11J43W
Number of pages: 200
Word Count: 58 K
Cover Artist: Lynne Hansen
Tagline: What others have called an obsession with death is really a desperate romance with life.
Book Description:
What others have called an obsession with death is really a desperate romance with life. Guided by curiosity, compassion, and a truly strange sense of humor, this particular morbid life is detailed through a death-positive collection of 45 confessional essays. Along the way, author Loren Rhoads takes prom pictures in a cemetery, spends a couple of days in a cadaver lab, eats bugs, survives the AIDS epidemic, chases ghosts, and publishes a little magazine called Morbid Curiosity.
Originally written for zines from Cyber-Psychos AOD to Zine World and online magazines from Gothic.Net to Scoutie Girl, these emotionally charged essays showcase the morbid curiosity and dark humor that transformed Rhoads into a leading voice of the curious and creepy.
Excerpt from "The Ghost of
Friends":
On Thanksgiving morning, I was making
coffee when Jeff strolled out of his room. I debated what I should say. When my
hands were busy filling the pot in the sink, I said, “I saw Blair’s ghost last
night.”
“I haven’t seen him,” Jeff said, “but I’ve
been pretty sure he was here.” I don’t know what I expected to hear, but that wasn’t
it. Jeff is very down-to-earth, feet on the ground. If he could sense the
ghost, then something must surely be there.
He told me, “One morning I was lying in bed
in that half-awake state, thinking about the ghost. I felt a blast of wind blow
straight up the length of my body into my face. When I opened my eyes, there
was nothing to be seen—and nowhere for the wind to have come from.”
I shivered. Jeff slept in the bed where
Blair suffered and died. It was all I could do to make myself sit on the bed when
we watched a movie.
“Did he speak to you?” Jeff asked.
“No.”
“I wonder what he wants.”
Of course, it could all be shrugged off as
the power of suggestion on susceptible minds. I was very high, then sleepy;
Jeff was half-awake. But it makes sense to me that if you don’t have a
corporeal body to affect real space, you have to work in those times and spaces
when people will be most likely to sense you. Or maybe he’s there all the time
and we’re only able to perceive him when we’ve lowered our resistance.
*
The last time I saw Blair’s ghost, he was
full color. He wore a red flannel shirt over black jeans, just as in life. His
hands were linked behind his head as he lounged on the bed, ankles crossed. His
black hair had grown out to the velvet stage. He looked healthier than he had
in the entire last year of his life. His dark eyes sparkled as he grinned at
me: Gotcha.
Immediately, I turned back to the stereo.
It was Monday. Blair had died on a Monday. He’d died in the afternoon, in this
room, on that same side of the bed.
All that flashed through my mind, followed
by a rush of fear. I did not want to have my back turned to Blair’s ghost.
I whirled around so fast that I stumbled
against the bookshelf and had to reach out to steady myself. The bed was empty
again. Blair was gone.
I reached the incense down from the
bookshelf and lit a stick of Blair’s favorite sandalwood. I waved the smoke
over the bed and myself before leaving it to burn on the bedside table.
“Be at peace,” I wished him, but I had the sense that he
was.
Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die, Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, a space opera trilogy, and a duet about a succubus and her angel. She is also the editor of Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: Tales of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual and Tales for the Camp Fire: An Anthology Benefiting Wildfire Relief. This Morbid Life, her 15th book, is the first in the No Rest for the Morbid Series. Book 2, Jet Lag and Other Blessings, will be out in 2022.
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Thanks so much for interviewing me!
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