Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

My recent trip to Tucson gave me two flights with some amazing photo opportunities. I am definitely that person who has the window shade up and my face plastered to the glass looking at everything, and this time it was truly rewarding. On the way down, I left under a cloud cover, but we quickly rose above it, and did about as close a fly-by of Mt. Rainier as I've ever done. As we passed beyond Rainier, I got to look over at some of the mountains through which I hiked last summer. Then we flew almost directly over Mt. Adams. At this point, we were angling well to the east, and as I was on the east side of the plane, the rest of the Cascade volcanoes were out of sight to me. I trust some of the people on the west side were looking at them. Meanwhile, we passed over the Columbia River. Pretty sure that's the Highway 97 bridge, which we crossed back at the beginning of December on our way home from California.  A fairly long period of unidentifiable eastern Oregon, and Nevada follo...

Title: N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia Author: Mark Piesing. Read by Matt Jamie Publication Info: Harper Audio, 2021. 11 hours 17 min. Source: Library digital resources Publisher's Blurb: The riveting true story of the largest polar rescue mission in history: the desperate race to find the survivors of the glamorous Arctic airship Italia, which crashed near the North Pole in 1928. Triumphantly returning from the North Pole on May 24, 1928, the world-famous exploring airship Italia—code-named N-4—was struck by a terrible storm and crashed somewhere over the Arctic ice, triggering the largest polar rescue mission in history. Helping lead the search was Roald Amundsen, the poles' greatest explorer, who himself soon went missing in the frozen wastes. Amundsen's body has never been found, the last victim of one of the Arctic's most enduring mysteries . . . During the Roaring Twenties, zeppe...

Well, here it is again--another week, another rush to finish my story in time to revise it for you! Chuck Wendig gave us two lists of words or phrases this week, to be randomly selected and turned into a title. Being a bit lazy, instead of opening my random number generator, I asked my son for two numbers between one and 20. His choices gave me "Pegasus" and "Intelligence." As is often the case when starting from the title, it gives the idea and then the story moves on so the fit is no longer perfect. But a tale's a tale for all that. I hearby give you, in 1001 words... The Intelligence of Pegasus  “We’re operating blind, that’s the hell of it!” The captain glanced at the hills that prevented his scouts from watching the enemy. “So you’ll let me go up?” The young lieutenant was practically panting with eagerness to show what he could do with his new-fangled machine. Captain Carmichael-Jones caressed horse that looked over his shoulder, and scowled at the mess of...