Loren Rhoads is the author of the space opera trilogy In the Wake of the Templars. She is co-author (with Brian Thomas) of Lost Angels, the first in a series about a succubus and her angel. Loren is also the author of the nonfiction travel guides 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel.
Her latest and second collection of stories features Alondra DeCourval, a young witch with a passion to make things right. In Alondra’s Investigations,, Alondra discovers a book that claims to have destroyed Atlantis, faces the things that ghosts fear, and makes the hardest sacrifice in New Orleans. (See book 1, Alondra's Experiments, for more stories including magical creatures and the limit she'll go for love.
The Alondra stories have appeared in the books Best New Horror #27, Strange California, Fright Mare: Women Write Horror, Sins of the Sirens: Fourteen Stories of Dark Desire, The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One, The Ghostbreakers: New Horrors, and nEvermore: Tales of Murder, Mystery, and the Macabre, as well as in upcoming issues of Occult Detective Quarterly and Weirdbook.
Five Questions:
Did something in the real world inspire Alondra’s
Investigations?
Yes, all three of the stories in the chapbook came
from things that really happened to me.
“Last-Born” grew out of visiting New Orleans. The tropical storms that come every afternoon
to flood the streets in late summer inspired me to pit Alondra against the
weather. Elijah Rousseau is a tribute to a man I met at the Voodoo Museum,
before my friend Wendy, who lived in New Orleans, warned me away from the
place.
“A Curiosity of Shadows” was born during the first
Haunted Mansion Writers Retreat, where several of my fellow writers were
menaced by a dense black shadow. The
shadow was even caught on video! I
wanted to explore the Mansion’s ghosts and pay tribute to the séances I went to
in high school.
What is your favorite scene in the book — and why?
What is your favorite scene in the book — and why?
That’s a touch choice, but I think the scene where the
creatures of Air come to parlay in “The Fatal Book.” I struggled to describe elementals without
visible bodies until one day I saw the wind playing with a newspaper. San Francisco is a very windy city,
particularly in the afternoon when the tide changes. The wind rolls Styrofoam cups down the
sidewalks or chases fallen leaves in spirals or dances with papers into the
air. I thought: what if that’s not the wind?
What was your writing process like as you wrote Alondra’s Investigations?
What was your writing process like as you wrote Alondra’s Investigations?
“Last-Born” took a long time to write, because I got
stalled after the first couple of scenes.
Brian Thomas, with whom I wrote the succubus novel Lost Angels,
suggested some dialogue for Simon LeBranche, Alondra’s cursed boyfriend, and
the story took off from there. I wrote
the last couple of scenes sitting in Golden Gate Park, scribbling into a
notebook when I was supposed to be exercising.
“The Fatal Book” was written in a torrent after I got invited to do a
reading with the writing group I grew up in.
The best part of researching that story was asking Alan Beatts from
Borderlands Bookstore how books used to be printed and bound. I’m really
fascinated by books bound in human skin.
“A Curiosity of Shadows” was written for the first Haunted Mansion
Project anthology and came together in a rush in order to make a very short
deadline.
What was the best thing that happened during your promotion of the book?
What was the best thing that happened during your promotion of the book?
T. Thorn Coyle, who I’ve admired for years, gave me
the best blurb.
What do you have planned next?
Yay! Thanks so much for doing this.
ReplyDeleteyou're welcome. stop by anytime!
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