Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Ha! it took me until well into Saturday, but I have for you an all-new story, the 20th installment in the adventures of Xavier Xanthum, Space Explorer.         Xavier Xanthum and the Unsettling Settlers   “I don’t think this was a good idea.” Xavier Xanthum, Space Explorer, found the words uttered by his ship’s AI to be both true and pointless.   The spears aimed at him from all sides were, alas, all too pointed. Xavier attempted a tried and true approach. “I come in peace.”   “And you’ll go in pieces.” The response came so quickly that Xavier knew it hadn’t gone through the translator box.   “What the hell? You speak Galactic Common? Here?” Oops. Not tactful.   Larry, the AI, gave him a local history lesson. “New Home was settled about ten generations back by a group opposed to all tech. They spent the first two or three hundred standard years eliminating any tech that came with them, even most machinery.” ...

I'm continuing to delve into the archives and pull out photos, mostly my husband's, from our trip to Patagonia in 2020. It's good to let his art out into the world a little, and it doesn't hurt too much.  We spent about 10 days in El Chalten, hiking the hills around Mt. Fitzroy. In past posts I've shared some shots of the amazing sunrise we photographed one morning, but there was so much more. I'll pick out some of the best to post over the next two or three weeks.  Today, we'll see some photos of Chorillo del Salto and a hike to Laguna Torre, with views of Cerro Torre and Fitzroy.  The waterfall. The valley of the Rio de las Vueltas, a classic braided glacial river (thus the color). Another day we did a hike to Laguna Torre. With Dave and his brother, we always started early, and were rewarded with great light and no crowds. That's me on the right.   Dave was a great one for making panoramas, stitched from high-quality individual shots. Reflecting pool....

Thanks to the author and publisher for the chance to review this book, which I won in a give-away (I also thank the blogger who ran the giveaway, but, alas, I'm not sure who it was, and won't guess). I'm posting this morning with the Marvelous Middle Grade Mondays blog hop. The hop is sponsored by  Greg Pattridge of Always in the Middle . Check out Greg's blog for a list of additional middle grade reviews.          Title: One Fine Voice Author: Rebecca Langston-George Publishing Info: Historium Press, 2026, 128 pages Source: won a paperback in a giveaway Publisher's Blurb (via Goodreads): All her life, Esther Hopkins has been told she has a mighty fine voice. Still, she can't believe her luck when just days after moving to town, she's invited to sing a solo at the 1923 Independence Day picnic. But the group sponsoring the picnic is not the benevolent fraternal order they claim to be. Worse, they've recruited her father, the town's freshly ...

  A couple of weeks ago I discovered I'd never completed sharing photos from our 2020 trip to Patagonia. I'm focusing on my late husband's photos from the trip, both because he was a better photographer than I'll ever be, and so that those photos don't just sit there on my hard drive, never seen. Last week we looked at the Perito Moreno glacier from the water. How about a look from the land? (Note: in 2026, just six years later, the glacier has changed from advancing to retreating, and is now something like half a mile from the viewpoint).   We'll end with a couple of videos of the glacier calving--some huge chunks came off, about 7 or 8 minutes apart.   In a pan near the end of this one you can see the huge, clean, deep blue space where the piece fell off in the previous video.   I hope you enjoyed this little visit to a now-endangered glacier (endangered, like all the rest, due to climate change).   I'll find some mountain photos for next week!   ☕ Buy me...

Well, I meant to post on Saturday. And I mean to get a blog post ready for Marvelous Middle Grade Monday. I miss all those deadlines because I just got tired, and distracted. You can enjoy this audiobook review of Amy Liptrot's memoir whenever I manage to finish it.     Title: The Outrun: A Memoir Author:  Amy Liptrot; read by Tracy Wiles Publication Info: Canongate Books, 2023, 7 hours. Original hardback 2016 by Canongate, 280 pages. Publisher's Blurb:   At the age of thirty, Amy Liptrot finds herself washed up back home on Orkney. Standing unstable on the island, she tries to come to terms with the addiction that has swallowed the last decade of her life. As she spends her mornings swimming in the bracingly cold sea, her days tracking Orkney's wildlife, and her nights searching the sky for the Merry Dancers, Amy discovers how the wild can restore life and renew hope.   My Review: This one didn't turn out to be quite what I expected. The blurb mad...

Oops--I guess my title kind of gave away the plot! I missed my Monday post due to a) not having time to make one, and b) not having a book ready to review. The reason for that is good, though: I have had visits from my kids the last two weekends, which put me behind on all my work but is totally worth it. Revisions on the book are proceeding, just as slowly and painfully as usual. Meanwhile, in other news, as many of you will have noticed, Draft2Digital has just put a new burden on those of us with lousy sales. I am sad to find that it will now cost me $12 per year to keep my books on all those web sites. I get it--they run on royalties, same as we do, and my books aren't earning them enough royalties, but it's hard on us little people.  I'd love to fix my low earnings, but alas, I have no magic solution, and even less ability to fix last year's sales.  (I also notice they don't say that the fee will disappear if I make more than $100 in 2026).  Since the fee won...

I've been rummaging around in the blog, and find that I never finished my report on our trip to Patagonia in 2020. That's not surprising (I was actually more surprised to find that I'd done any posts at all, as that was the last trip I did with my husband, and he was killed just weeks after returning home). I'm not going to do a report, but I think I'll share some of Dave's fantastic photos from the parts of that trip I didn't report on.  On one day, we did a cruise on Lago Argentina, which included cruising by the Perito Moreno Glacier, which we'd visited the previous day from the land side. This glacier has been in the news because at that point, it was one of very few worldwide that was still advancing--and it is now in retreat. Read more about that at Karen Grove's excellent Landscapes Revealed blog.  Meanwhile, enjoy some of Dave's photos. He was a much better photographer than I am. We're way up an arm of the lake, and I think that we ...