August 2025 – Jennifer Lane Books

Congratulations to Rebecca Douglas on the launch of her third Seffi Wardwell Mystery: EDITED OUT!

Pre-order price is $3.99—a short-time special offer ending Oct. 1.

Purchase links:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FLB4MDN2

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, a tough job ahead breaking down the locals’ suspicion of outsiders and making friends—and a distressing tendency to find herself in the middle of murder investigations.

Edited Out blurb:

Working part-time at the local inn is fun, until everything goes sideways. When a uniformly disliked writer-in-residence turns up dead, the local police ask Seffi to use her botanical knowledge to figure out what killed her. And could she hurry up, before the inn’s business tanks, and takes the bakery down with it?

Author Bio:

Rebecca M. Douglass has lived, worked, and hiked around the American west for more years than she’ll admit, while raising two children to adulthood and dreaming up interesting ways to bump people off. Thanks to good friends in Maine, she has also spent time on the other side of the country and has fallen in love with that coast. Since retiring from work at the library, the author of the Ninja Librarian series for younger readers and the Pismawallops PTA mystery series lives in Seattle, where she is writing the Seffi Wardwell mysteries. She has also had short stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. When she isn’t writing, Ms. Douglass likes to go hiking and backpacking or to travel to discover new places or revisit old favorites, including the Sierra Nevada mountains, the desert Southwest, and of course Maine, where so many of the best cozy mysteries are found.

Thanks to **Alex Cavanaugh** for starting the **Insecure Writers Support Group**! We post monthly to cheer each other on.

Thank you to the awesome IWSG co-hosts this month: Ronel Janse van Vuuren,Natalie Aguirre,Sarah – The Faux Fountain Pen, and Olga Godim!

I’ll skip this month’s question since I don’t know much about the publishing industry. Instead, I’ll focus on my work-in-progress. My novel doesn’t fit into any genre I know. Maybe I’ll just call it a trauma drama.

I’m about three-fourths done with the story, which alternates chapters between a male swim coach and a female psychologist. I’ve known the character arc for the hero since I started the novel over a year ago, but the heroine’s journey is less clear. I’m trying to structure the plot as crisscrossed narratives–as his trauma heals, hers is just starting. But creeping doubts and perfectionism have led me to feel a bit stuck. Since the coach’s therapy involves challenging beliefs that have kept him mired in the past (“stuck points”), my feeling seems ironic.

While writing this post, I experienced an insight. Maybe I know the hero’s path so well because I tread it every day with therapy clients. The indomitable human spirit’s potential to recover is my main inspiration for writing the story. But the horror leading up to a trauma is (thank God) less familiar to me. And maybe it’s tough to go full-throttle with torturing my heroine since we have the same career.

I just need to keep butt in chair and continue writing. One bonus is that I decided to stop working my psychologist job on Fridays, freeing up more time to create and resolve conflict for my characters.

Thank you for listening, support group! How do you get unstuck when you’re not sure which direction to write?

Novel in Progress Update: Low Water 65,500 / ~85,000 words