Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

  Flashback Friday is a monthly meme that takes place on the last Friday of the month . The idea is to give a little more love to a post you’ve published on your blog before.  Maybe you just love it, maybe it’s appropriate for now, or maybe it just didn’t get the attention it deserved when you first published it. Thanks to Michael d’Agostino, who started it all, there is a solution – join Flashback Friday! And thanks to Jemima Pett , who has kept it going--visit her blog to add your name to the list ! Just join in whenever you like, repost one of your own blog posts , including any copyright notices on text or media, on the last Friday of the month. ** I dug into the archives and found this story from 2014. It started with a Chuck Wendig challenge, apparently (according to my notes) a given first line. It suggests a world to me that might be fun to enter more deeply. Dragonmistress She rode in on a dragon; or more accurately, clutched in its front claw.  It wasn’t exactly the entra

  Flashback Friday is a monthly meme that takes place on the last Friday of the month . The idea is to give a little more love to a post you’ve published on your blog before.  Maybe you just love it, maybe it’s appropriate for now, or maybe it just didn’t get the attention it deserved when you first published it. Thanks to Michael d’Agostino, who started it all, there is a solution – join Flashback Friday! And thanks to Jemima Pett , who has kept it going--visit her blog to add your name to the list ! Just join in whenever you like, repost one of your own blog posts , including any copyright notices on text or media, on the last Friday of the month. I went way back for this one, and found a nice little tale of Bovrell the Bold. Those who have read Halitor the Hero will know that he was Halitor's apprentice master, teaching him the art of Heroing. He may, just *may* have been a poor choice. Dead Man’s Revenge Bovrell the Bold looked furtively about him before ducking through th

  Flashback Friday is a monthly meme that takes place on the last Friday of the month . The idea is to give a little more love to a post you’ve published on your blog before.  Maybe you just love it, maybe it’s appropriate for now, or maybe it just didn’t get the attention it deserved when you first published it. Thanks to Michael d’Agostino, who started it all, there is a solution – join Flashback Friday! And thanks to Jemima Pett , who has kept it going--visit her blog to add your name to the list ! Just join in whenever you like, repost one of your own blog posts , including any copyright notices on text or media, on the last Friday of the month. Yes, I know that was supposed to be last week. But I was confused, and shared photos instead. So here's a good flashback story. I wrote this about 3 years ago after a pack trip, and it's not really fiction. We had some good t-storms again this time, so I thought I'd pull it out. It's super short. Fear and Trembling in a

  Flashback Friday is a monthly meme that takes place on the last Friday of the month . The idea is to give a little more love to a post you’ve published on your blog before.  Maybe you just love it, maybe it’s appropriate for now, or maybe it just didn’t get the attention it deserved when you first published it. Thanks to Michael d’Agostino, who started it all, there is a solution – join Flashback Friday! Just join in whenever you like, repost one of your own blog posts , including any copyright notices on text or media, on the last Friday of the month. Use the Flashback Friday logo above, as designed by Michael d’Agostino. Link it back to host Jemima Pett (there's a linky list!) and add a link to your post in the comments on Jemima's post (or mine, or any other participant's).  ### I wanted a Pismawallops PTA story for Flashback Friday again, since the newest book just came out this week, so I hunted a long way back through the archives and found this story from 201

  Flashback Friday is a monthly meme that takes place on the last Friday of the month . The idea is to give a little more love to a post you’ve published on your blog before.  Maybe you just love it, maybe it’s appropriate for now, or maybe it just didn’t get the attention it deserved when you first published it. Thanks to Michael d’Agostino, who started it all, there is a solution – join Flashback Friday! Just join in whenever you like, repost one of your own blog posts , including any copyright notices on text or media, on the last Friday of the month. Use the Flashback Friday logo above, as designed by Michael d’Agostino. Link it back to host Jemima Pett (there's a linky list!) and add a link to your post in the comments on Jemima's post (or mine, or any other participant's). Since Friday is my flash fiction day, I've been sharing stories from the archives. This one dates back to 2013, and since it is a mystery featuring my heroine, JJ MacGregor of Pismawallops

  Flashback Friday is a monthly meme that takes place on the last Friday of the month . The idea is to give a little more love to a post you’ve published on your blog before.  Maybe you just love it, maybe it’s appropriate for now, or maybe it just didn’t get the attention it deserved when you first published it. Thanks to Michael d’Agostino, who started it all, there is a solution – join Flashback Friday! Just join in whenever you like, repost one of your own blog posts , including any copyright notices on text or media, on the last Friday of the month. Use the Flashback Friday logo above, as designed by Michael d’Agostino. Link it back to host Jemima Pett (there's a linky list!) and add a link to your post in the comments on Jemima's post (or mine, or any other participant's). Since Friday is my flash fiction day, I've been sharing stories from the archives. This one dates back to May of 2015. Garbage Cans I knew we were in trouble when the garbage cans starte

It's the last Friday of the month, and that means time for FlashBack Friday! It's every blogger's chance to take a little break and re-run a post that you really like, or wish had gotten more attention. Join in! Just add the logo, and jump over to Jemima Pett's post where she's managing the hop and add your link in the comments. Then visit the other participants to see what else you might have missed! I found this food-related flash fiction to share in honor of Thanksgiving. I might have used it before, but I still like it. The narrator does find in the end he has a lot to be grateful for. 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

First the eclipse. As regular readers of this blog will recall, I drove to Oregon last weekend with my oldest son in order to witness the total solar eclipse. I have to say that it was a fantastic experience, and worth the cost of a rental car (because ours chose just that moment to develop a perplexing electrical problem) and 3 days of driving. At least we avoided the massive traffic jams that made some people's trips home 2 or 3 times longer than they should have been. Okay, I'm lying. That's not an eclipse. That's sunset in California, thanks to the fires everywhere. And the reality was even redder than the photo shows. We targeted the National Forest lands east of John Day, Oregon, in hopes of avoiding the worst crowds. Our plan worked pretty well. That is to say, the small towns along the path of totality were absolute zoos, but we needed nothing there--we'd filled the gas tank farther out, and had all our own food and water with us. The National Forest was al

      It's Flashback Friday again! Which is perfect since the Ninja Librarian is on the trail, enjoying a holiday from computers and all connectivity. Which is why we haven't responded to comments this week. We'll get there...eventually.    Meanwhile, enjoy this from 2015. It was an A to Z post, so not really one that didn't get attention at the time, but still a story I like.   The Grey Trail I never wanted to go there. She was obsessed with New Zealand, and after thoroughly exploring all the areas used in the filming of The Lord of the Rings, she fixated on Mt. Cook. South Island. The end of the world, if you ask me, but she loved it and visited several times. I didn’t go with her on any of her trips, but this time I had no choice. This time, she couldn’t go without me. I was doing it for love, for that one last thing I could do for the one I’d loved and who had driven me crazy for forty years. I was prepared to hate it, and to feel like a virtuous martyr the

It's Flashback Friday, and time to pull something out of the archives that I think could stand a little more exposure. If you'd like to join the fun, clink on the image above to visit Michael d'Agonstino's A Life Examined blog and see how! I found this lovely number from January 2014. It runs about 1170 words. Millions of Cats Things never work out according to plan when there are cats involved.  I knew that, and I should have known better than to take the job.  But Keelan made it all sound so easy: we just had to pick up the consignment from Alpha-Centauri 4 and take them to Exilion 17.  Four days, max, and two of them in hyperspace. “What could go wrong?”  I should really have run when Keelan said that, because I know darned well that anytime those words are uttered a disaster is sure to follow. Unfortunately, we needed cash, and the cat people had it.  So we went and picked up the load of cats. That was where the trouble began.  They were supposed to be crated, se

It's Flashback Friday, and time to pull something out of the archives that I think could stand a little more exposure. I found this one which also fits the Wendig Challenge, more or less, and only got a couple of comments when it first aired in 2015. The funny thing is that it goes the opposite way of the story I wrote (about hope) for this week's challenge (which I'll share next week). So here we have... Helplessly Hoping When everything has already gone wrong and there’s nothing more to do, they say that all you have left is hope. At that point, “hope” is a four-letter word. I had always thought hope meant you had guts. You didn’t give up, even though things looked bad. Turns out there’s a world of difference between looking bad and being hopeless. I knew that now. When you are helpless and there is no one to come save your ass, hope is for cowards. I wasn’t going to die helplessly hoping. I’d die with my eyes wide open, grinning right back at Death. *** Today start

It's the last Flashback Friday of the year (and a very convenient time to have it, as the author is visiting family and far too focused on over-eating to write a new story this week). Flashback Friday is the brainchild of Michael D'Agostino; to learn more, click on the banner above! To stick with the spirit of the season, I found the original flash-length version of "Halitor at Midwinter." A longer version appears in the Bookelves Anthology, Vol. 2 , along with six other winter tales by authors of wonderful books for middle-grade readers (as we like to say, for 10-year-olds of all ages). But for now, enjoy a cold night with Halitor. Halitor at Midwinter Halitor the Hero stared gloomily into his fire and sighed. He remembered how it had been this time last year. He’d been warm, for one thing. Snow had been falling then, just as it did now, but he’d been in Alcedor Castle, with Melly and the king and all the court, enough people and enough fires to make even a drafty ol