Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Thanks to Great Escapes Virtual Book Tours for the opportunity to read and review this fun cozy! A  Basket Case (Maddie Sparks Mystery Series) by Lesley A Diehl About A Basket Case       A Basket Case (Maddie Sparks Mystery Series)   Cozy Mystery 2nd in Series   Setting - Upstate New York   Publisher ‏ : ‎ Camel Press (November 12, 2024) Paperback ‏ : ‎ 250 pages   ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1684922208 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1684922208 Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0D4MWFWSP   Maddie Sparks believes she has found the perfect balance in her life--Zack, the man she loves, a book she loves writing and volunteer work at a local museum with a granddaughter she adores. An old flame from Zack's past arrives and drives a wedge into Maddie and Zack's romance, her writing stalls and someone murders the museum's director just as the museum is about to return a collection of Native American artifacts to the Onondaga and Oneida nations. Standing over the dead body o...

Back in October I went in a matter of days from the onset of winter in the Canadian Rockies to some too-hot weather in my favorite big hole in the ground--the Grand Canyon.  This year's trip was the toughest I've tacked yet, coming down off the North Rim on the Indian Hollow and Bill Hall trails (we got spooked off the Bill Hall trail for the initial drop, and anyway, I really like the Esplanade so didn't mind a longer walk on that platform). I went with my friend Alex again, and we took 5 nights to do the classic Thunder River to Deer Creek loop.  We'll take a look at the first two or three days. Day Zero We needed to cache water for our return trip, a final night on the waterless Esplanade, so we did a pre-hike the day before our permit started to take care of that. Because it was still getting very hot--there was that heat dome thing going on over most of the country, so temps weren't what they should have been in October--we camped near the trail head and made a...

It's the first Wednesday of the Month, and that means time for our Insecure Writers Support Group posts! I'm having to make a fast trip to California this week, so I may be slow responding, but I will get to you if you leave a comment!   Purpose:   To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds! Posting:   The first Wednesday of every month is officially   Insecure Writer’s Support Group   day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting!   Don't forget you can ...

I think this was the result of a random search through the library's juvenile historical fiction. I'm posting today with t he fantastic Marvelous Middle Grade Mondays blog hop hosted by Greg Pattrige of Always in the Middle . Check out Greg's blog for a list of additional middle grade reviews. I've been discovering some great reads there!    Title: Nothing Else But Miracles Author: Kate Albus, read by Carrie Coello Publication Info: Tantor Audio, 2023. 7 hours. Hardback published 2023 by Margaret Ferguson Books, 288 pages. Source: Library Publisher's Blurb : Twelve-year-old Dory Byrne lives with her brothers on New York City's Lower East Side, waiting impatiently through the darkest hours of World War II for her pop to come home from fighting Hitler. Legally speaking, Dory's brother, Fish, isn't old enough to be in charge of Dory and her younger brother, Pike, but the neighborhood knows the score and, like Pop always says, "the neighborhoo...

Here's piece written back in 2016, and touched up a little for today's post. It seemed like a good response to this week's Day of Overeating Thanksgiving holiday.   What’s for Dinner?  Mom’s acting weird. Well, that’s kind of normal, if you follow me, because she’s always weird, but usually she’s weird like wearing strange clothes and working all night on one of those bizarre sculptures she makes. I won’t ever tell her this, but I don’t like them. They have too many jagged edges. They’ll tear holes in you if you get too close. I sometimes wonder if she’s out to destroy someone, or if she just sees the world that way, all jagged. Either way: weird.   But what’s really weird is that she’s started cooking. No more Swanson’s pot pies, and no more trips through the fast food drive-through window. So now, I have to eat what she calls “real food,” which is sometimes pretty unreal, if you know what I mean.   Her idea of real food can get pretty d...

Happy Thanksgiving to all my US readers! Here's a turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner. I've now been drafting like crazy for two weeks, and have broken 30,000 words--more than 1/3 of the way through the book. I have a corpse, a bunch of suspects, and a lot of notes about the things I've forgotten to include or to follow up on. With the holiday this week it'll be hard to keep up my writing goals, as I'll be prioritizing time with the visiting kids, but if I manage to stay more or less on track I'll be close to halfway by the end of the week. The biggest holdup is that I haven't outlined much beyond where I am now, so there may be delays while I figure out how to get where I need to go. Or I may just keep writing, knowing where I need to end up, and hope for the best. The end result seems to be similar either way: a big mess that takes a lot of rewriting to make come out right. In the meantime, I'll have eaten my fill of turkey and pie, and that's wort...

  Title: The Curve of Time: New, Expanded Edition Author: M. Wylie Blanchet Publication Info: Whitecap Books, 2011, 272 pages. Originally published by Blackwood & Sons in 1961. Source: Library P ublisher's Blurb : Widowed at the age of thirty-five, Muriel Wylie Blanchet packed up her five children in the summers that followed and set sail aboard the twenty-five-foot Caprice . For fifteen summers, in the 1920s and 1930s, the family explored the coves and islands of the BC coast, encountering settlers and hermits, hungry bears and dangerous tides, and falling under the spell of the region’s natural beauty. Driven by curiosity, the family followed the quiet coastline, and Blanchet—known as Capi, after her boat—recorded their wonder as they threaded their way between the snowfields, slept under the bright stars and wandered through Indigenous winter villages left empty in the summer months. The Curve of Time weaves the story of these years into a memoir that has insp...