Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

It has been 12 years since Ninja Captain Alex Cavanaugh launched the Insecure Writers' Support Group. He obviously hit a nerve and filled a need, because the group has been going strong ever since, with monthly blog-hop postings and tons of encouragement, support, and often very concrete help being passed around the group. While the membership does fluctuate, a look at the top half of the sign-up list will show you people who have been active more or less from the start. Take a look at their stories! In personal news:  A Coastal Corpse has released at last! The first book in my new Seffi Wardwell mysteries is now available for sale. I am currently deciding if I'm going to jump right into editing the (already drafted) second book in the series, or draft the third book first. Series Blurb: Retired science teacher Seffi Wardwell is making herself a new home on the Maine coast. She has a flower garden to keep up to the stiff local standards and a tough job in br...

  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 ...

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 ...

  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 Joylene Nowell Butler, Chemist Ken, Natalie Aguirre, Nancy Gideon, and Cathrina Constantine! Be sure you...

A couple of weeks ago I sent my current draft of A Coastal Corpse off to a couple of readers. I didn't feel quite ready to send it to lots of beta readers, but needed some help and/or assurance that I haven't written a complete train wreck. So, the question is, as I wait for feedback, what do I do? I'm kind of flailing around, messing a bit with ideas for the next novel in the series, and another story that might be a long short or even a novel, wholly out of my usual style so I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm also not quite sure it it's historical fiction, fantasy, or SF, so there's that little problem. What do you do when you're at a hiatus in a large project? Take a vacation? Do promotional work (like that's going to happen--I've pretty much proven I'm not going there)? Write short stories?  My instinct is to get to work on shorts and flash fiction, and try to sell some stories. It's getting started that seems hard. Share your strategi...

  The IWSG is a fantastic group of writers and bloggers who share posts the first Wednesday of each  month. 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! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! The awesome co-hosts for the September 1 posting of the IWSG are:   Jemima Pett, J Lenni Dorner, Cathrina Constantine, Ronel Janse van Vuuren, and Mary Aalgaard!   Every month, we announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say.  Remember, the question is optional!    October 6 question - In your writing, where do you draw ...

Death By Donut has launched! The Pismawallops PTA series is, at least for the moment, at rest. I am free at last to follow up with the new sleuth who took up residence in my brain over a year ago. Or am I? It feels like everywhere I turn with my new characters I come crashing up against something that feels too personal, or too disturbing. I could try to write a mystery without a murder, but it's not just the primary death--it's people's backstories with their losses and traumas, all sorts of things. I'm a little scared to move forward. Am I afraid of my own feelings, or of what others will think if I write something that few people will actually know resonates with my own experience? And isn't writing about our own pain part of what we do? I could shift from mystery to other genres, but for one thing, mysteries are what I write, what I know how to write and what my readers are coming to expect. For another, I think the basic problem will always be there: I now kn...

It's time for the monthly IWSG posting!  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.    January 6 question - Being a writer, when you're reading someone else's work, what stops you from finishing a book/throws you out...

  It's the first Wednesday of the month, and that means time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group post. The IWSG is the brainchild of the amazing Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh. Since we are all insecure and can use all the support we can get, huge thanks to Alex and this month's co-hosts, Pat Garcia, Sylvia Ney, Liesbet @ Roaming About Cathrina Constantine, and Natalie Aguirre!   Each month we have an optional question to spark discussion.  This month's Optional Question: are there months or times of the year when you are more productive than others, and why? Let me know what you think! I think this is the flip side of the question about when it is hard to write, or what makes it hard. I've commented in the past that travel/vacations mess with my ability to write regularly, since there tends not to be a lot of down time, and a lot of distractions. Aside from the obvious corollary that writing happens more when I'm at home, I'm not sure whe...

  It's the first Wednesday of the month, and that means time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group post. The IWSG is the brainchild of the amazing Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh. Since we are all insecure and can use all the support we can get, huge thanks to Alex and this month's co-hosts, Jemi Fraser, Kim Lajevardi, L.G Keltner, Tyrean Martinson, and Rachna Chhabria! Every month there is an optional question to spark our posts and discussions. This month's question is (stripped of all the explanation you will find here ): Why do you write what you write? Now for my post... I'll get to the question in a minute. First, the big question: to NaNo, or not to NaNo? That's right--November is National Novel Writing Month, and many of us like to use the energy of the event to push our work along. So am I doing it this month?  My answer to that appears to be a great big "sort of." When I first drafted this post on Oct. 30, I was still working on edits ...

Yeah, okay, so maybe I should have done the review before the year ended, but here it is! It's also IWSG day, and I'll answer the IWSG question below. Writing: The first thing I have to say, because otherwise I'll feel a little discouraged about progress, is that we spent a little over half the year traveling. I don't get much writer-work done when traveling (despite the photo above, where I'm writing under non-optimal circs. That's my journal, which is usually as much as I manage). So some things changed: my blogging became less frequent and much more erratic, and I wrote very few pieces of flash fiction for the blog, but posted more photos. On the other hand, I managed to write, submit, and get accepted (eventually), two short stories, one in the IWSG Anthology (take a look below at the lovely cover). I'm rather proud that I was able to do major revisions of the Pismawallops PTA mystery I drafted in November and December 2018 during our quiet times in Chri...

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! Be sure to link to the IWSG page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog! If it links to Google+, be sure your blog is listed there. Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can't find you to comment back. Let’s rock the neurotic writing...