Gothic Goodies on STEAMED!
I’m still in London. It’s awesome. So awesome, little else matters. I’ve visited so many historical places and walked from one end of this incredible city to the other more times than I can count in the past month. I’m still here for another two weeks. Thus, I’ve been very lax about updating this blog, The Order of the White Feather, or keeping up with my guest post commitment over at STEAMED! I have managed to work on my forthcoming novel The Ghosts of Southwark (sequel to The Zombies of Mesmer), get a few reblogged articles up on OWF, and finally get a blog published at STEAMED (only a month late). Head over to STEAMED! to read a post on Gothic Goodies: Piling Up the Dead. Here’s an excerpt:
Gothic London, its varied history, and just getting to and from places has kept me so busy and exhausted over the past month that I’ve shirked my duties as guest blogger for STEAMED. My apologies. Even now as I write this, I’m on a bus to the train station to see the editor of Gearhearts Steampunk Glamour Revue, Patricia H Ash-Vilodosa. Unlike most places in the USA (and even many in the UK), traveling in London can be an all-day affair. If I’m out of the flat (and not indulging in a frothy mocha at a Starbucks), I’m either on a bus, on the tube, or walking up to 10 miles a day exploring this glorious city. I’ve even hired a Barclay Bicycle and tooled around a bit. Great fun. It’s not unusual that I get totally lost walking from here to there, even with my Mini A to Z, discovering many wondrous things along the way. Things, of course, that I would unlikely ever be able to find again.
I highly recommend going on guided walks in London on your visit, but not through London Walks. Although they have a varied menu of walks, it’s really hit or miss with the guide and crowd. It’s not unusual for them to have 50-100 people on a walk, and then it’s a big mess. You can’t hear the guide and your constantly moving with a huge crowd. Not fun. For you Gothic Ghost Story fans, I can’t recommend the walks hosted by Richard Jones enough. He came highly recommended to me by my writerly colleague Leanna Renee Hieber. Richard has written something like twenty-three books on haunted London. Leanna used some of his ghosts in her fabulous Strangely Beautiful series.
Last week I had the great pleasure of meeting Richard and talking about publishing and marketing with him between the stops on the Sweeney Todd Haunted Walking Tour, which I thoroughly enjoyed. His dramatic presentation of ghost stories and history is fabulously entertaining. On his walk, I learned that many of the churchyards throughout London are higher than the rest of the city. This is because in the early 19th century, they were quite literally burying people on top of one another. The gravediggers would dig up a grave, move the existing bones out of the way, wait until after the current mourners were done saying their goodbyes, and then they’d slip the bones back in the new grave.
Read more over at STEAMED! and find out what “fishing” is…it’s not what you think.
Enjoying a mocha on the South Bank right in front of The Globe Theatre
May you find peace. xo
Caught in the Cogs 