Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

  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 (click on the badge above for the list) and connect with your fellow writers - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting! Time for the red pen! And now for my own post: Editing Hell (and you can take the first word as a verb or the whole thing as a compound noun). This is a live(ish)* report on the editing progress for Book 3 of the Pismawallops PTA mystery series (tentatively

After watching Jemima Pett do it for a year or two, I decided it's time for me to jump on the bandwagon with The Bookshelf Gargoyle's Fiction in 50 challenge . That's a complete story, in exactly 50 words, written to a prompt he provides for each month. Posting is the last week of the month, and I'm targeting Mondays of the last week. This is my first attempt, so go easy on me--it's harder than it looks! Moving with the Times Innovation can be hard on the tradition-bound. I’m really trying, though, to get used to reading the new way. My son says anyone can do it. It’s easy, he says. But it’s not easy, rapping him over the knuckles with one of the new-fangled books. My old scrolls are better. ©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017 As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

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

I don't often do these, because I don't like to advertise a book on here unless I've read it and know at least some of my readers may enjoy it! But I read and reviewed the preceding book in the series, The Black Thumb , and since I enjoyed it and plan to follow the series, I'll share this great deal with you all! Amazon has priced The Blessed Event by Frankie Bow at just 99⊄ for the month of January!  (Free on Kindle Unlimited) The Blessed Event (The Professor Molly Mysteries) Publisher: Hawaiian Heritage Press (June 10, 2016) Paperback: 344 pages ISBN-13: 978-1943476251 Kindle ASIN: B01GW5WUAE Synopsis "You may wonder what my least-favorite student was doing in my living room. In a twist of fate that might seem hilarious if it happened to someone else, he was now my stepson." Professor Molly Barda is looking forward to a quiet summer in Mahina, Hawaii working on her research and adjusting to married life. But when a visit from her new husband's rela

Title: Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd Author: Alan Bradley; read by Jayne Entwistle Publisher: Books on Tape, 2016. Original by Delacourt Press, 331 pages Source: Library digital services Publisher's Summary: In spite of being ejected from Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy in Canada, twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce is excited to be sailing home to England. But instead of a joyous homecoming, she is greeted on the docks with unfortunate news: Her father has fallen ill, and a hospital visit will have to wait while he rests. But with Flavia’s blasted sisters and insufferable cousin underfoot, Buckshaw now seems both too empty—and not empty enough. Only too eager to run an errand for the vicar’s wife, Flavia hops on her trusty bicycle, Gladys, to deliver a message to a reclusive wood-carver. Finding the front door ajar, Flavia enters and stumbles upon the poor man’s body hanging upside down on the back of his bedroom door. The only living creature in the house is a feline

Chuck Wendig's clearly feeling a bit down. After last week's apocalypse challenge, this week we were to write our greatest fear. I've already done that once , so I put my tongue in my cheek for 998 words of the greatest terror of my kids' generation. Nightmare Our nightmare began at 7:52 p.m. I know that because the time kept blinking from my useless phone, a vicious reminder of what had been lost between one minute and the next. At 7:51 we were all safe and content in our own worlds, chatting with friends in distant cities, reading newspapers from around the world. Watching cat videos. And at 7:52 it was all gone as though it had never been. Our Internet service had crashed. When we recovered from our initial shock, we slunk into the kitchen, avoiding each others’ eyes as we fumbled with unfamiliar foods, unable to look up cooking instructions on line. Dinner was an awkward meal with each person staring fixedly at a screen, willing it to come back to life. Josh finally

  We're posting today as part of another Great Escapes Free Book Tour! Title: Time Out (Dodie O'Dell Mysteries #2) Author: Suzanne Trauth Publisher: Lyrical Underground, 2017. 240 pages. Source: Free electronic ARC as part of the blog tour. Publisher's Blurb:   The amateur actors at the Etonville Little Theatre may be known for chewing the scenery, but restaurant manager Dodie O’Dell has something more appetizing for them to sink their teeth into. She’s been taking bows in her small New Jersey town for her theme menus, designed to complement the local productions. This fall, the community theatre is staging Arsenic and Old Lace, set in 1940s Brooklyn, so Dodie is serving up hot dogs, Italian ices, egg creams, and knishes at the weekend food festival. All is going well until Antonio Digenza, the ex-Off-Off-Broadway director of the show, dies dramatically while noshing on a knish. As rumors of food poisoning quickly spread, Dodie scrambles to rescue the Windjammer

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and in honor of the day I decided to look over and review some children's books on his life. I won't claim that these are the best, or even very carefully selected. I did what most kids or parents would do: went to the children's biographies section of the library and picked out the most promising-looking books of what was there (I'm sure there are others that were checked out). I got three rather different books. Here are my thoughts, in brief, on each.   Title: Free At Last: The Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. Author: Angela Bull Publisher: DK Publishing, 2009. 47 pages. This is a fairly conventional biography, at about a 3rd grade (8-year-old) reading level. It has sidebars with information about things mentioned in the main text, from slavery to the invention of television, and ample illustrations to engage less-adept readers. The biography is well-written, and includes the more challenging parts, like Martin's inability

Chuck Wendig is finally back on the job with our weekly challenges, and for reasons that don't take a lot of parsing, our challenge this week was to write an apocalypse. We weren't supposed to do the usual apocalypse, though, but instead to come up with a whole new sort, which I didn't really do. Instead, I picked up on something he said about writing "your uniquely-you" apocalypse, and that got me to thinking about how one person's world can end while everyone else's goes on. I was also thinking about the book I just finished about "Wicked Women" of the frontier , and got some ideas going in my head. So you don't really get a story about an apocalypse, just one human's personal end of the world, in right about 1000 words. When Worlds End I read the book of Revelation when I was a little girl, and found there a story of how the end of the world that turned out to be rubbish. Well, I don't actually know that. It’s just that we don’t ge