Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

The Ninja Librarian has gone hiking.* While we are away, here are some marmots for you. *This also means that responses to comments will be delayed. There's no internet in the mountains, and if there were the NL wouldn't use it. So: marmots. I believe the marmots in question, from Sequoia National Park, are yellow belly marmots. I never before saw a marmot washing its face. Keeping watch This guy was watching our camp last year in a different part of the Park. They crave salt, and will chew any kind of gear or clothing to get it. I'm pretty sure he was eyeing my boots. These guys are all lovely. Marmots are cute and furry and a lot of fun to watch. As a public service, I'm adding a photo that's not so lovely. This is a spot called Lonely Lake. It took us 3 days to reach it, two days off trail. And what did we find? Someone's trash. Not from a hiker, this time. From someone who either carelessly or deliberately let go a mylar balloon. If we hadn't carried it

In a nice collision of discouragements to a new story, not only did Terribleminds.com not give us a writing prompt this week, but the Ninja Librarian was out backpacking and only got home late Wednesday. Somehow, with all the other chores, a new story didn't get written. So...how about a sneak preview of The Problem of Peggy, i.e. the Ninja Librarian #3? This is from Chapter 1, and is about 2000 words. Trouble Brewing With nothing much for entertainment in Skunk Corners, everyone came to the spelling bee. They couldn’t all jam into the schoolroom, so we all trooped over to Tess’s, where the barroom had more space. Johnny agreed not to serve anything stronger than sarsaparilla while the kids were there, and we got down to some serious spelling. Eunice Reeves was up, trying to spell “procrastination,” when I slipped out the door for some air and a trip to the privy. Tom and Tess between them were running the spelling bee, and doing a fine job of it.   I finished what I went out to d

We are into the summer travel and hiking season, and that means less time to read and review books. But it means more photos to share! We recently spent a week in Maine, so here are a few highlights. Among other things (like visiting colleges with our about-to-be-Senior), we spent three days camping at Flagstaff lake, a large man-made lake about 25 miles from the border with Quebec. This gave us a chance to get up very, very early and see the sunrise (do you know how early the sun rises in Maine a few days after the summer solstice??). Given how warm the days were, it was something of a surprise to find it was only 43 degrees when we crawled out at 4:45 a.m. Mist rising on the water before the sun hits. We thought this pond looked like moose habitat, but the moose didn't cooperate. We went on to climb peaks in the Bigelow Range, some of the highest in Maine (not very high by western standards, but the trails start low and climb rather directly). This was the sucker part, the easy w

  Title: Weedflower Author:   Cynthia Kadohata Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006 Source: Library Publisher's Summary: Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to. That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor. Other Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the emperor, even if, like Sumiko, they were born in the United States! As suspicions grow, Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military barrack that is her new "h

This week Chuck Wendig challenged us to write a story in which insomnia plays some role . I picked on poor Xavier Xanthum again, and went just 3 words over the 1000-word limit. Sleep Xavier Xanthum, Space Explorer, was regretting having landed on his latest discovery. Granted, it was what he did. And the planet looked good; money in the bank if it checked out. Larry’s scans had shown no particular hazards or dangerous life-forms. Larry didn’t make many mistakes. Xavier was pretty sure, looking at the five-legged beast with very large teeth, that he’d made one this time. The creature looked dangerous, and Xavier didn’t want to stick around to find out if he was right. The trouble was, he was too far from the landing pod to retreat. Xavier couldn’t even begin to imagine how a five-legged creature could keep track of its feet, let alone run, but he was pretty sure the mind behind those teeth knew the answer. There was only one place to go, and Xavier went. The planet had a lot of plant li

This month the IWSG has a prompt (maybe we do every month? I can be so slow to pick up on these things). That's convenient, because I didn't know what to write about this time, except to fret some more because I'm not actually writing this summer. So far, I'm mostly traveling. Which is totally cool, except...my book! It's not happening! Okay, so the prompt is   What's the best thing someone has ever said about your writing? It looks so easy. It would be easy just to say it's , "When's the next book coming?" and that's even fairly true. I mean, especially the first time a reader indicated how eager she was for the next book it was a total thrill. And basically every time someone leaves a comment on my blog (especially on the flash fiction) telling me that they loved the story I just posted, I pretty much do a happy dance. But maybe the best thing anyone has ever said was about my first published book, The Ninja Librarian . The president of

Just for fun...a little excerpt from the 4th of July in Skunk Corners, as the author is very busy just now and is already late with this post :D  It's a little long, being a whole chapter from The Ninja Librarian , but it's good reading for this holiday! THE NINJA LIBRARIAN AND THE GLORIOUS FOURTH, PART II I have seldom enjoyed a meal as much as I did that Independence Day picnic.  I sat with Tommy and Peggy, and it would be hard to say which of us ate the most.  I’d never have believed kids their size could stow away that much food, though some of it may have ended up in pockets for later.   Across from us, the Ninja Librarian ate with a restraint I could scarcely imagine.  Either they teach an awful sort of self-denial wherever he learned to be what he is, or he’s a far better cook than I am. Or maybe not all those widows had given up.   I was distracted from the thought by the appearance of another dish of potato salad.  By the time we’d taken care of that, the mayor was up