Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

 I found this in the archives from 2016. It made me laugh, and I hope it gives you a smile.  Sit back and enjoy a warm vacation as winter continues... 860 words The Devil’s in the Details   “Watch your step as you exit the bus. The ground may be uneven or extremely hot. Watch your step…” The guide droned on, words and intonation exactly the same as each person stepped down out of the tour bus. He seemed unaffected by the exclamations of the tourists.   “It’s sure hot here!” “Hope the hotel has AC.” “Darling, I don’t know…” “Well you said you wanted to go someplace warm.”   The man and woman, dressed in plaid Bermuda shorts (him) and a hibiscus-print sundress (her) clutched each other’s arms as they looked around the blasted volcanic landscape. All that hot lava looked very close.   “Hey! Keep moving!” Someone behind them called. “We want to get off this bus and see too, you know!”   “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” the woman whispered

 ... though somehow a whole week went by without a post. I got back from my 5-day writer residency in Oregon, full of excitement about writing and with a ton of work facing me as the listing date for my house approaches. I want to do a report on the residency and share some photos, but that will come next week. For now, I'll give you another bit of fiction from the archives. This story seems particularly appropriate in these unsettled days. It was originally written to a photo prompt, a picture of a gazing ball on top of a fence post.   The World In the Palm of Her Hand All Lissa knew was that she was supposed to save the world. In point of fact, she didn’t really know even that: she’d had a message from some mysterious old man who refused to show his face, exactly according to regulations. The message read, “She has the world in the palm of her hand. Don’t let her drop it.” In theory that left the field so impossibly wide open that there was little hope of finding the right woman,

I'm off celebrating my youngest son's university graduation. While I'm busy, I hope you enjoy this story from 2015!   The Gods' Own Keeper Osbert Godskeeper scurried across the Great Hall of Chaotica. Orgo and Hempto were fighting again, and Osbert had no desire to get caught between those two. Neither had learned the control proper to a god, and Orgo tended to leak lightning when he got mad. Hempto was worse. He smoked. Not his pipe, which was bad enough--the gods’ herb of choice stunk, as far as Osbert was concerned. But when Hempto was upset, smoke came out of every orifice. It stunk even worse than his pipe, or Chacto the Great's cigars, and it burned. Hempto was a fire god, and nothing but trouble.   When he had reached the far end of the hall and the safety of his office, Osbert’s manner changed. No longer a frightened, scurrying figure, he stood erect and took firm hold of his microphone, scowling fiercely at the battling behemoths.  

  Before I give you a story, I get my little brag. My story for the February WEP was runner-up in the judging . I think people want humor these days! If you missed it, the story is here .   I wrote this story in 2014. It's kind of a fun venture into seeing the world in different ways :)  I'm reposting it complete with the photo from the original. This was written to a sort of prompt that challenged the writer to turn something very ordinary into a story. 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 t

  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 found this one from 2015, and it made me laugh, because we just crossed the Rocky Mountains during the May 20 snowstorm, which might have made us think we were lost. We've also gotten a GPS unit, which has led us astray at least twice, insisting that vague tracks in the dirt are roads. This was from 2015, written for the lette

Flashback Friday:    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 found this one from 2014 that seemed appropriate, given that we are definitely on the road, and will be starting across the country about the time this posts up! This story is a merging of two Chuck Wendig challenges. A couple of weeks ago he ran a random title challenge that sparked the story, and I finished it of

Since I’m not really even sure what day it is, let alone what month, I’m going to toss out a Flashback Friday today (which turns out to be Friday where I am, though in fact the first of the month, not the last—I know this thanks to the calendar in Blogger). I decided to take a quick look back at my first year of blogging, and stumbled on this post that still seems relevant in most ways. Reposted from Dec. 20, 2012 Take a Zero I've been catching up on some through-hikers I was following last summer.  For those of you who aren't backpackers (in the US sense, not the European sense), through-hikers are people who hike an entire long trail (Pacific Crest Trail, Appalachian Trail, etc.) in a single season (well, more like 3 seasons, starting very early in spring and continuing until they arrive at the end or snow gets too deep to manage, whichever comes first).  I'd been following a couple of PCT hikers, and got distracted, so I went back yesterday and read the blogs all the way

  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.  ###### This month's Flashback post is a 650-word story I'd forgotten all about. I thought it was about time for some action from Xavier Xanthum, Space Explorer, and this in my opinion is on of the best of his tales. Xavier Xanthum's New Year Xavier Xanthum, Space Explorer, gazed morosely at the fuel-level indicator of the s

  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 posted the first half of this story a couple of weeks ago because I was using parts of it in the new Pismawallops PTA mystery.  You can check that out if you don't remember or didn't read it, because this is part two, and needs the first half to make sense. In a quick summary, Kitty and JJ have been setting up the PTA

  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 in search of something appropriate to the season and found this story. Not exactly a Halloween story, but there are monsters enough to satisfy, I hope. This one appears to have clocked in at exactly 1000 words, and I said this about it when I first published it in May of 2016: Chuck Wendig gave us a new chal