Accidentally Yours Available as Ebook

Accidentally Yours, a collection of short stories, poems, and essays, by Joan H. Young is now available as an eBook from Amazon and Smashwords. It should appear on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, and Overdrive in just a few days. The paperback edition will also be ready in a few days.

The volume contains 30 poems, 16 short stories (several of which are micro-fiction), and 9 non-fiction essays. Thematically, they are all over the map. That will keep you from getting bored. It also gives you a glimpse into my chaotic mind. Enter if you dare. All this for $3.99 in the eBook format!

Diana Kathryn Wolfe-Plopa, founder of Pages Promotions, LLC, and an author in her own right, says, "This collection of short stories, essays, and poetry feels like a Literary Advent Calendar. Each time I turned the page, I was given a little gift of story, perspective, and art. It was impossible to take it slowly. Remarkable in this writing is the flash fiction pieces sprinkled throughout. The art of writing a complete story in just a few short lines is a difficult skill to master. Joan does it here with an acumen and comfort that reveals the true nature of her outstanding writing gifts. The balance between shorter and longer pieces creates a natural ebb and flow to the writing."

And Jean Davis, author of speculative fiction writes, "A delightful collection of poetry and prose that will make you gasp, laugh out loud, and fondly appreciate days gone by."

After a frustrating day of formatting woes (I usually don't have many problems, but the issues probably stemmed from culling the pieces from many different files, created in various versions of several different software packages), both major platforms (Amazon and Smashwords) have approved the files, and they look pretty clean. I don't see a bunch of formatting oddities in the previews.

You can find Accidentally Yours at Amazon and Smashwords.

Fall Off the Couch Laughing is Published

Fall Off the Couch Laughing is a collection of ten humorous essays written over the last several years. Most previously appeared in the Ludington Daily News in my monthly column "Get Off the Couch." One essay has never been published prior to this collection.

Titles included are:
• Do Ticks Go to Heaven?
• The Top Ten Reasons to Stay On the Couch
• sKumquats and InYourFace vs My www
• Snowshoes? Just Give Me a Couple of Months
• The Arrival of Unwanted Body Parts
• Neologism Snowclone - Ramblings of a Cold Brain
• Not Sleeping at Sleeping Bear
• The Evolution of the Sock
• Not Men of the Liberated Mind Set
• The Hike from Heaven or Hell- You’re Invited

Although eBooks aren't generally a great venue for picture books, these essay collections include photographs. This book features ten carefully selected pictures.

My monthly column has been running for six full years, totaling more than 70 installments. I'm slowing collecting them into sets with similar themes. Columns are not available online unless you have an e-subscription to the newspaper. These collections are economical, and gathered into topical groups.

Only $1.89. Only on Smashwords.

Fall Off the Couch Laughing
Get Off the Couch with Joan

Working on "Fall Off the Couch Laughing"

I'm hopeful that this eBook will take a lot less time than the first one. For one thing, the seemingly complex steps you need to follow to format a book for Smashwords doesn't seem so daunting this time.

Also, I know what I need to do with the pictures to incorporate them. E-books don't deal very will with images, but they are an important part of my essays. And they do load in all formats except the plain text version. From my first experience, I learned that I need to make the caption a part of the image itself.

So, I'm working on getting the ten essays collected into one document, and choosing the order. Then I'll put the pictures in.

Cover for Next e-Book- Fall Off the Couch Laughing

OK, I shouldn't have spent the time, but I just wanted to be able to say I made some progress on this one.

The next collection of my essays will be Fall Off the Couch Laughing. The results are not guaranteed, but they should be good for a chuckle or two!

Now I have to get it all formatted for Smashwords. Hopefully, within the next month.

Finding "Old" Writings

Yesterday, my new printer came, and although it's about the same size as the previous one, it's got the trays and things arranged differently. This meant that I had to do a little shifting of things in that section of my office, which precipitated my checking the last (one can always hope) of the 3.5 inch floppy disks I still have to make sure I have everything off them.

Found a few things that had not been previously backed up, including a nearly finished essay about when Chips was a puppy. He was such a special dog, I'm really glad I didn't lose this piece of writing. Here's a sample:

At two weeks of age, puppies really do look like their plush counterparts, the Pound Puppies." He was a fat little ball with legs splayed out sideways, and a stub of a tail that oscillated allegro. His nose was flat and wrinkled. But his color was fascinating. You could never say that he was white, because he wasn't. You could certainly never say that he was yellow; that wasn't right either. The closest way to describe it would be to imagine swirling a little bit of coffee into a cup of milk until it was almost, but not quite, mixed. When the light hit his fur, though, he shone, like the color of fresh-split wood chips in the sunshine. His ears were short, his eyes were dark buttons, and he had one smudge of brown from his nose to his chin, as if he had just tried to lick a chocolate pudding pop, and missed. Instead, he licked my face. I knew I was hooked.