Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Possibly the fact that my Wednesday post is only being written and posted after Wednesday is well along tells you everything you need to know about the state of the writer just now! I have been home from my travels for just over a week, and am *finally* getting things sorted out enough to start turning my brain to writing, though not with the focus I'd like. I chose not to do any writing work while on my Africa trip, beyond keeping my journal. Only at the very end did I succumb to the itch to write and began drafting a bit of flash fiction (not finished, which also says a lot about my state of mind--how hard is it to at least draft a story of under 1000 words?). And on the trip home (during a16 1/2-hour leg of the roughly 41 hours door to door) I finally opened the emails from my beta readers and began thinking about what they said. Flying over places we never expected to go. It was no part of our intention to have *quite* such a long trip home, but the strikes at Lufthansa sent us

Yes, my friends, it's that time again! Revisions! Notes and outlines and corrections and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!  Whenever and wherever I have the chance to work on it. Okay, those are old photos, but you get the idea.  Today's discussion: where am I in the process, and how is it going?  Way back last fall, just before I began drafting Seffi Wardwell #3 ( Edited Out ), I took a squint at #2. My initial reaction was that I'd done an amazing job with the first draft (not something I usually think). My second reaction was that if I thought it was all in such good shape, I needed a second opinion. I don't usually care to have anyone read a story until I've revised it a couple of times, but I needed advice, so Ellen Jacobson kindly agreed to read the MS of Washed Up With the Tide .   Thanks to Ellen's insightful comments, I am now in the process of my usual level of revision and re-vision. Between her comments and my own realizations as I began reading aga

NaNoWriMo--National Novel Writing Month--is officially over, even for my extended goal, and I'm ready to reflect on the experience and the process. Goals: I set my goal to hit the 80,000-word norm for my novels by December 10.  The result: Edited Out turned out to be more like 74K, and even shorter in the quick-and-dirty draft that left out some things. I went back and added some missing scenes, then was left with the choice of "failing" or cheating. Reader, I cheated. I finished out the last few days with whatever other writing I had on hand to do, to make it up to 80K. Result: I have a very rough and rocky draft of the novel, some personal stuff that needed writing, and partial draft of a short story that may be the germ of the next Seffi Wardwell mystery. Win-win? Maybe. I also have a bit of burnout. Writing daily, and often writing a LOT each day, left me with a story I'm not sure how to continue and a desire not to look at any of it for a while. On the other han

This is a big post, so fasten your seat belts!  First: This is IWSG day, so I have a short post to report out on NaNoWriMo.       Why? The IWSG is here to share and encourage, to offer a place for authors to admit their insecurities and offer help and support to each other. How? The official IWSG posting day is the first Wednesday of every month. Hop around the list and see who has worries, triumphs, and news to share.  Every month we have an optional question to spark discussion.  Our motto:  Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. The awesome co-hosts for the December 6 posting of the IWSG are C. Lee McKenzie, JQ Rose, Jennifer Lane, and Jacqui Murray! Every month, we announce an optional question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. December 6 question: Book reviews are for the readers. When you leave a book review do yo

Well, this has been a mixed bag, as evidenced in part by my post being a day late (look for Photo Friday on Saturday, too).  Of course, having pretty much a week with the house full of company added extra challenges. But every day I was able to write at least a few hundred words, and some days I clobbered the word counts, so at this point I am still well ahead of my target, if not keeping up quite the level of over-achieving I was at the beginning of the month. So my writing time has been up and down. What about the actual writing? You know, the way the story is going and all that? Ups. Way up there. Downs. Way down there.   That's been a bit up and down as well. I have a lot of big holes in the story that need to be filled. And that turns out to be a good thing, because at the moment I seem to have wrapped up the basic story line at about 65,000 words--well short of my usual 80K for a cozy mystery. We'll see how close I come; 70K is still in the ballpark. Of course, I went and

Why can I never, no matter how hard I try to plan, figure out what's going to keep the middle of my books going? Quick, prop up the middle of that thing! Seriously, I have oodles of notes of things that should or could happen in the middle of the book--and no idea where or how to bring them in, or in some cases, how they are even relevant. I'm beginning to think it's no use trying to prepare for this stage of the draft--by now I've wandered far enough from the outline that all preparation is futile! Let's just hope I can still sail into the ending I have in mind. This is why I don't write scenes out of order. If I did, half of them would go to waste because by the time I got to them they wouldn't belong anymore. Actually, I did write a couple of scenes out of order for A Coastal Corpse --and both ended up deleted. It's time to throw another obstacle in Seffi's path--I know that. But what the obstacle should be, I'm less certain. What do you do wh

We're a week into NaNoWriMo, and if you are participating, I hope it's going well for you! I'm flying right now--I think this is the best outline I've ever had going in, and the payoff is huge. People aren't always doing or saying what I thought they would, or in the way I expected, but I know where I'm going and so far the writing has been pretty easy. I know that there will be some challenging times later in the month, schedule-wise, so I'm stockpiling words for the holiday period. There will also be more challenging sections of the story--the dreaded mid-book sag. But I have a lot of notes about what might go in there, so hope to be able to keep sailing through. For this week, then, I'm singing the praises of preparation, and of community--I got a great start the first day at a local write-in. I'd love to find more writers a little more in my age range, though. I felt like an old lady at the write-in! If you're a NaNer, or even if you aren'

Before I start, a tip of my hat to this day 26 years ago, when I became a parent for the first time. What a long, strange trip it's been!   On to writing--or research.  In the run-up to NaNoWriMo I've been posting about the process of preparing to draft my next novel, #3 in the Seffi Wardwell series (I'll be editing #2 once this is drafted, and hope to publish it by June if all goes well). I've talked a lot, now and in the past, about outlines, plotting vs. pantsing (or plantsing, as I mostly do these days). Today, let's talk about research. What kind of research? I'm too lazy to write historical fiction (I'm very hard on writers of same so would really have to educate myself about a period in hopes of avoiding the kind of mistake I hate to see). I set my cozies in fictional contemporary places. And yet... research is still necessary. For the Seffi Wardwell mysteries I'm finding I need two kinds of research. First is the kind you can do in books and on t

I'm most of a day late with my Wednesday post for the simple reason that I lost track of the days again. This is a nice problem to have, especially as it's because I'm back on the road again, this time hanging in Maine with a friend, enjoying the fall colors (but that overnight flight cost me a day, somehow. Not sure how that worked...). In any case, it's time for my annual (more or less) post about preparing for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and plotting vs. pantsing. In so many aspects of my life, I like to fly by the seat of my pants. On my recent road trip, I seldom knew where I would stop until I got there. Even while backpacking in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, I didn't try to stick too closely to a plan, going instead where it seemed to make sense given the weather (on other sorts of trips, I do like to know exactly where I'm going and why, but that's a different story). We've been here before, though. Writing a mystery with no plan

It's the first Wednesday of the month, and that means it's time for our IWSG post!       Why? The IWSG is here to share and encourage, to offer a place for authors to admit their insecurities and offer help and support to each other. How? The official IWSG posting day is the first Wednesday of every month. Hop around the list and see who has worries, triumphs, and news to share.  Every month we have an optional question to spark discussion.  Our motto:  Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. The awesome co-hosts for the October 4   posting of the IWSG are  Natalie Aguirre,   Kim Lajevardi,   Debs Carey,   Gwen Gardner,   Patricia Josephine,  and, well, ME! October 4 question: The topic of AI writing has been heavily debated across the world. According to various sources, generative AI will assist writers, not replace them. What are your thoughts? I really don't have much to say in regards to the optional question,

It has been 12 years since Ninja Captain Alex Cavanaugh launched the Insecure Writers' Support Group. He obviously hit a nerve and filled a need, because the group has been going strong ever since, with monthly blog-hop postings and tons of encouragement, support, and often very concrete help being passed around the group. While the membership does fluctuate, a look at the top half of the sign-up list will show you people who have been active more or less from the start. Take a look at their stories! In personal news:  A Coastal Corpse has released at last! The first book in my new Seffi Wardwell mysteries is now available for sale. I am currently deciding if I'm going to jump right into editing the (already drafted) second book in the series, or draft the third book first. Series Blurb: Retired science teacher Seffi Wardwell is making herself a new home on the Maine coast. She has a flower garden to keep up to the stiff local standards and a tough job in br