Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Thanks to an injury to my foot (exact extent of the problem TBD when I see the doctor Thursday), I came home early. Also thanks to that injury, I've been putting in some long hours on the last stages of revision before I send A Coastal Corpse to my beta readers to see how I've done at addressing the issues that sidelined it last year. I'll be sending it out in a few days. If you are willing to read for cohesion, consistency, character, and plot (but not yet polish), let me know and I'll include you. Meanwhile, I wrote 2/3 of a short story while hanging about in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and will get back to that as soon as I get the novel out. I missed the deadline for the original inspiration for the story, but will find other markets when it's ready. I also did a lot of sitting and thinking down there (and a certain amount of just sitting); some of that may come out here and there in my writing as well.   Cloaked Press's Spring into Sci Fi 2023 , contai

I'm traveling again, so I may not be able to visit you right away if you comment. But I will get there. And do drop around and visit the other participants!   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--and we owe it all to the amazing Ninja Captain Alex ! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and ha

    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--and we owe it all to the amazing Ninja Captain Alex ! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. The awesome co-hosts for the March 1 posting of the IWSG are Diedre Knight, Tonya Drecker, Bish Denham, Olga Godim, and JQ Rose!

Okay, not writing as in generating new text, but editing and rewriting, which any writer knows is the real work of writing. Yes, work on the first of the new Seffi Wardwell series has resumed, and I'm diving into what was wrong with my main character and how I can fix that. The woman in my head had definitely not come out on the page, and I had to dive into some hard places to ask myself why not. The answers were complicated, but I think in large part boiled down to me not being ready (when I first drafted it) to deal with some aspects of her backstory.  I think I can handle Seffi's story now, but I have also realized that a lot of it doesn't need to enter into the book at all. Figuring out just what the reader needs to know will be part of my task. I'm also working on moving the narration more into deep POV, something I've been learning about and think would improve the narrative voice. If you are interested in getting a sneak preview--i.e., being a beta reader (po

For the last few weeks I've been teaching a class on novel writing at the local senior-education non-profit. I started with a lot of ideas about what I should cover and how I should teach it, almost all of which I had to chuck the first day. Instead, my four students and I are wandering through different aspects of creating a story, the decisions that must be made about character, setting, plot, voice, narrative point of view, etc.  The result? A great excuse for me to delve more deeply into elements of my craft that I haven't thought about consciously, or haven't thought about enough. I get to talk about them with people who read a lot and write at least some. My neat and orderly progression through the stages of writing got dumped, but I, at least, am learning a lot! Here are some of the very relevant things I've been thinking about: Character . What does it take to make a character that readers will like, identify with, or at the least give a hoot about? How do you m

  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! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG The awesome co-hosts for the February 1 posting of the IWSG are  Jacqui Murray,   Ronel Janse van Vuuren,   Pat Garcia,  and  Gwen Gardner! Every month, our wonderful leaders announce a quest

It's time for this writer to check in with a progress report, and what I have to report is... less writing, more thinking. This state of affairs has been brought on by me having agreed to teach a class on novel writing at a local senior center. This in turn has forced me to do something I haven't done for a couple of decades: class prep. This turns out to be a good thing, on the whole. Yes, I'm using my writing time to prep for class. But what I'm really doing is thinking about aspects of creating a novel. This week, for example, I've been focused on character. For those of you with amazing memories, you may recall that character is exactly what has been giving me holy heck in the last novel, so this might be a good thing. At this point, I am realizing how much needs to be juggled in writing our characters: their voices. Their backstories. Their conflicts and motivations. Oh, yeah, and their physical descriptions, which I tend to more or less leave out, and is that

This is my "Writer's Wednesday" post, coming a day late to give the final wrap-up on NaNoWriMo. If you've been a "Nanner" this month, please chime in and let me know how it went for you. I set my goal absurdly high at the beginning of the month, matching the reality of an 80K-word standard for novels in my genre. I talked about the project way back in the last IWSG post on Nov. 2.  Tonight I reached the end of my day's writing energy, and then some, at 72,032 words. That's the most I've even done in a month, and I have some thoughts about that, and about life and its relationship to writing. First, I figured out tonight how to adjust my personal goal, so I dropped it down to 70k for a "win." That doesn't actually change the fact that I'm going to spend the next two days in my artist's retreat trying to finish the book. So here are five things I learned this month: 1. Go ahead and set your goals high. Whatever "high&quo

I think I'm overdue for a writer check-in. I've been visiting a friend in Maine and enjoying fall color, walks in yellow-orange-red forests, and good times with friends. But there has also been some time to write (at least, to write those hasty #writephoto flash pieces!) and to think about writing. "Thinking about writing" sounds like the sort of thing you do when you want to be a writer but don't want to actually do the work, so let me clarify. I'm thinking fairly specifically about a new novel in development (while I wait to see what I'm going to do with the one I worked on for the last year). I am, in fact, plotting my next murder while I walk (in a manner of speaking. No actual people are hurt in this plotting, though inattention to where I'm walking may injure me if I'm not careful). The process of developing a new story is a somewhat long and convoluted one for me. I start with a germ of an idea. In this case, like the last, it was the discov

  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! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. The awesome co-hosts for the October 5 posting of the IWSG are Tonja Drecker, Victoria Marie Lees, Mary Aalgaard, and Sandra Cox! Be sure you drop in on them and see what they have

I seem to be having a lot of trouble getting back into the habit of blogging. Maybe that's my subconscious telling me something, like... maybe I should only post when I have something to say?  In all seriousness, I've been carrying on with blogging following the "rules" from when I first started ten years ago, and the truth is, everything has changed. I have appreciated the community that comes with being an active blogger, and I know that I want to remain part of the IWSG. But does blogging three days a week make sense anymore? Do people care about my book reviews, when I get around to writing them? (That's an interesting question--I definitely read and pay attention to reviews from a few bloggers I know have similar tastes, or whose reviews make it clear when a book won't be to my taste). I'm not sure about doing the book tours, either, as they carry an assumption that you will like the book well enough for three stars, anyway. For the record, when I hav

Those of you who follow the IWSG and especially the IWSG book club may have noticed some helpful posts from Toi Thomas about how to make your books more discoverable. I have long been aware that sometimes my blog barely reflects at all the fact that I write novels. The time may have come to fix that! One of her suggestions was to write articles about your books, your writing process, etc.  I have been trying to raise my profile as a writer by writing most weeks about progress and the process. But that still doesn't bring up my books, especially the ones that are out there to buy as opposed to the ones I'm working on. To address that, I am launching a new series of "Writer's Wednesday" posts specifically about my books, starting with this post about Pismawallops Island, the fictional setting of my PTA mystery series. Everything you wanted to know about Pismawallops Island but were afraid to ask Where is Pismawallops Island located? Pismawallops is an island in the

  What is the IWSG? Read on! 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! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. The awesome co-hosts for the June 1 posting of the IWSG are SE White, Cathrina Constantine, Natalie Aguire, Joylene Nowell Butler, and Jacqui Murray! The Optional Ju

My writing updates are starting to sound a bit like a broken record: still trying to wrap up the rewrite of A Coastal Corpse (unless it turns out to be Hydrangeas and Homicide ), still struggling, and still not finishing or submitting any new short stories. I'm working hard to cut myself some slack about this, given how much is going on in my life. Instead of talking about all that (though it might be a good little sermon about cutting ourselves some slack when life makes it hard to be a writer), let's talk about what to do when a plot point just won't come out right. All suggestions and opinions welcome. See, I'm still not happy with my vision for the end of the novel, even though part of the reason for the complete rewrite was to make that all just flow as smoothly as chocolate over the rollers in the Ghiradelli factory. (Can you tell I'm also largely off desserts?). At this point, I have two approaches I keep trying: 1. Just keep writing dreck and hope that the r