Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Well what do you know? Here it is, Wednesday again, and time for another writer's update. I have sadly little progress to report, on either my writing or editing my photos (and I haven't done my taxes yet, either). I think there's no getting away from the truth: I'm goofing off, procrastinating, and not working very hard at much of anything. I've not been completely idle, though. I *have* been working on my book. I'm not sure it's productive, but I've been producing a very lovely multi-colored outline of the book, tracing the clues leading to the perp, all the red herrings, the distractions, and the secondary mystery. Why? Well, for one thing, it's pretty :D  For another, I'm hoping that seeing how all the bits fit in will help me see where to fit in the bits that got left out. It might even be working. Meanwhile, I'm 1/3 of the way through one of me 2 beta reads, with the second queued up. In fact, I've decided that it's probably mor

In the interests of putting things back to normal, at least as a writer/blogger, it's time for my regular "Writer's Update." As my title suggests, this might be a little embarrassing this week. Seriously, how can it already be a week since last Wednesday and the IWSG post? Based on the amount I've gotten done (of anything productive, not just writing), it's been about 36 hours, and I've been asleep most of it.... I'm not going to beat myself up over that. We've been readjusting our household, not to mention going through the mental lag I always experience after extended travel. But I am going to use this to hold myself accountable for the coming weeks. That's right: I'm setting some deadlines. By the end of the week: edit and prepare my WEP post edit an additional story I worked on aboard ship edit 3 more chapters of the new Pismawallops PTA mystery, Death By Donut For a larger deadline, I want to have DBD ready for Beta readers by mid-May.

When I'm shooting for a daily word count, it's not the final thousand or so that cause trouble. It's words 1-100, sometimes 1-200. In other words, getting started. This is not a post about how to fix that problem. This is a  post about how not to. For those of you wondering how to do it right, here's how to accomplish very little writing: Step one : Read the paper over breakfast. All of it. Pause occasionally to play Word With Friends. Step two: Check all your social media sites. Remind yourself that this is really working, because your social media presence is important. Go back and check Facebook again, because important things might have happened to someone while you were reading about the effects of climate change in Greenland. Return to other sites to read a few trip reports. Drift off into a fantasy of loading up your backpack and hitting the trail. Step three: Open your computer files. Set up the desktop how you like it. Look at the clock. Step four:  Read a bit