EyeLeash is Jess's debut novel, a teenage memoir/semi-autobiography/coming-of-age story set in the digital era.

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Jade Ashton is a sassy virgin. In her private blog, she vents about “fitting in” a world where superficiality reigns supreme.

Suddenly all logic flies out the window when she meets Novan: the former geek, who’s morphed into a delicious songwriter-musician.

They decide to be “friends-with-benefits”. But it’s Novan, with his poems and riddling passages on his own blog — which *isn’t private* — that backs out.

EyeLeash captures self-discovery in the 2000s, and showcases the colorful, intricate drama in two youths’ relentless search for themselves — and what’s really in their hearts.

GENRE: New Media / Popular Culture / Teenage Memoir / Coming of Age / Dating & Sex

When the first wounded Marines arrived from Korea in the fall of 1950, Charles Hughes was a Navy hospital corpsman working on the wards at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. He was gripped by the stories those young men told. Too young for World War II and having missed that opportunity, Hughes now discovered in himself a strong desire to escape routine ward duties and travel to the country whose existence he had just recently learned about and find out what combat is really like. He and his friend Ollie Langston decided to volunteer for the Fleet Marine Force. Just days after they submitted their request they found themselves undergoing combat training at Camp Pendleton, the Marine base at Oceanside, California. Their desire to see what combat was like was more than satisfied in the months that followed.

Accordion War: Korea 1951 - Life and Death in a Marine Rifle Company is a detailed personal account of combat in the Korean War during its most violent "blitzkrieg" phase, the first third of the three-year war. While the descriptions of battles are up close and graphic, the conflict is also viewed from the perspective of the 21st century, from a keen awareness of the wars since —Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror. Interwoven into the narrative is a meditation on life, death and war —on the question of why men spend so much treasure and blood fighting one another. The setting is the Republic of Korea, a beautiful country whose citizens fought for their freedom alongside United Nations forces, a people who have, since the war, emerged from the shadows of history to become cultural and technological leaders in the modern world. But Accordion War is first of all the story of a band of brothers and the battles they fought half way round the world in the rugged mountains of the country known as "the Land of the Morning Calm".

Fifty years before all America and the world were horror-struck by images of exploding planes and falling towers, September 11 was seared into the memories of the men in How Company, Third Battalion, Seventh Regiment, First Marine Division. There is a connection between those two days exactly a half-century apart. That connection can be found not far from Ground Zero in the village of Stewart Manor on Long Island inscribed on a memorial plaque dedicated to victims of 9/11 — and in this book.

Free e-book: Literary resume of Marlies Bugmann, Karl-May translator. It introduces the world and works of Karl May to English-speaking readers and contains a selection of excerpts of the major works Marlies has translated, to sample Karl May’s fantastic fiction.

Author Sharon E. Cathcart started 2010 with two resolutions: take more exercise and learn French cookery. Instead, she found herself on a journey of personal growth as she rose to unanticipated challenges.

Have you ever wondered how far a grandmother would go to get the hottest Christmas toy for her baby granddaughter? I never did until I witnessed how desperate my mother was to get a Cabbage Patch doll for my baby niece in the early 1980s. A violent incident that would forever changed my life.

A shorter version of this 875-word essay was first published in Soft Whispers Magazine (November 2009).

Laura is about to embark on a once in a lifetime opportunity. Granted a twelve month working holiday visa to travel Australia, Laura wants to make the most of every experience that comes her way. Based on a real life account, these stories highlight what can happen on a remarkable year away. Laura invites you to read these candid stories, tales of adventure and excitement, and she also shares with you everything she didn't mention in her weekly telephone conversations back home.

ONE MAN'S JOURNEY FROM COAST TO COAST. NO PROMISES. NO GUARANTEES. AND NO MONEY.

What would you do if you had to journey penniless across America, depending only on the kindness of those you met along the way?

If you're Mike McIntyre, you might meet...A biker-turned-minister who shares faith, food, and self-defense tips with a stranger on the road...A lady firefighter who used to be a man...A lonely woman who offers a place to spend the night, and in the morning feels the loss of yet another man who leaves her...

Stuck in a job he no longer found fulfilling, journalist Mike McIntyre felt his life was quickly passing him by. So one day he hit the road to trek from one end of the country to the other with little more than the clothes on his back and without a single penny in his pocket. Through his travels, he found varying degrees of kindness in strangers from all walks of life—and discovered more about people and values and life on the road in America than he'd ever thought possible.

In this Oprah-featured book, McIntyre recounts how the gifts of food and shelter he received along the way were outweighed only by the touching gifts of the heart—the willingness of many he met to welcome a lonely stranger into their homes...and the discovery that sometimes those who give the most are the ones with the least to spare.

A day in the life of Old Shatterhand aka Kara ben Nemsi aka Karl May, a story of the Wild West, and a story of the Orient.

Stalking the Average Man chronicles an adventurous soul surviving the world’s hot spots, while working as a soundman for CBS, NBC, and CBC television news, then being confronted with the truth of his life:
When the doors to opportunity that had freely flung open all of his life slammed shut, John began writing a behind-the-scenes war coverage book. A fortuitous comment led to him meeting a beautiful woman whose own work in progress dealt with the design of destiny, miracles, and apparently him: Unnecessarily, Bonnie dangled intrigues from her story to secure John’s help with a particular aspect of her plot. As an average looking man, whose naiveté had been savaged in places like San Salvador and Beirut, he reasoned that a romance between them was no less absurd an idea than the premises she seemed to already embrace. And he decided to pursue her affections under the guise of assisting her. Portentously, learning her full story was like sucking gelatine through a straw; she would say only that it involved a rescue mission of such massive proportion and intricate design that rescuers had to undergo rigorous training before they could participate. Bonnie then asked John to go through these lessons so that she could accurately portray a trainee’s development. She added that without this background information, her story would sound like pure fantasy and that it was for this reason that the target’s location was kept from participants until they were ready to hear it. They subsequently worked closely, if often combatively, as she kept him at bay like a bemused fox playing with a myopic rabbit, and the friction between them regularly blossomed when his beliefs became examples of why the rescue mission was necessary. Finally, the absurdities she had brilliantly justified in her work notwithstanding, she made a claim too ridiculous to contemplate even within the context of their unfettered debates. Realizing he had been chasing a brilliant lunatic, John decided to cut his losses. However, while gathering the courage to abandon her otherwise delightful companionship and their challenging discussions, he had what would have been inexplicable experiences had Bonnie not surreptitiously prepared him for them.
And there he stood, poised like Agnes Whistling Elk had positioned Lynn V. Andrews and to where don Juan Matus had led Carlos Castaneda before her, to leap into the darkest corners of himself. The mission required it, and he knew it could be no other way.

In April 1968, we were a country at war with ourselves and increasingly with a small country halfway around the world: Vietnam. I don’t recall ever thinking about Vietnam when I started college in 1963. By 1968, it was all any of us could think about. This memoir was written for my grandchildren, but it will give anyone some sense of what it was like to serve a tour of duty in Vietnam. The job I had gave me an excellent overview of how the gears of the war machine meshed together. I have tried to convey this as best I can.

This is a memoir with a point of view. War is not a good thing, and the things it does to its warriors are especially bad. In these times when we seem to be constantly marching off to yet another war in yet another faraway place, the lessons learned (and forgotten) from Vietnam are more important than ever.

Part autobiography and part inspiration, "Les Pensees Dangereuses" (French for "dangerous thoughts") is a series of essays on friendship, spirituality, education, bullying, animals, clinical depression and more. Author Sharon E. Cathcart ("In The Eye of The Beholder") shares her thoughts, including an unfinished autobiography, "Unmasking My Phantoms: My Dance With Madness," in this new book.

Rimwood Tales is my autobiography, my struggle to survive and to find a better life.
I was Born in Rimbach i/O Germany, on March 15, 1931. In 1933 when I was two years old we moved to Weinheim an der Bergstrasse. There I went to school and I still wonder today how we managed to learn anything. Most of the time we were sitting in the basement because of air-raids. In 1945 I started my apprenticeship as an industrial electrician.
In 1951 I decided to seek greener pastures in Canada. We arrived in Halifax in November and took the train to Winnipeg. After tree days we got a job in a logging camp west of Calgary. We worked there for six weeks. My next job was as a lineman in Drumheller. In the summer of 1951 we decided to follow that old saying: Go West young man. We had several jobs in Vancouver and eventually I ended up in a sawmill in Youbou, Vancouver Island.
In 1957 the girls in the hen-house, as it was called, put on a birthday party for me and invited some of their friends. Among them was a cute redhead; it was love at first sight and eight weeks later we were married. We decided to have our honeymoon in Germany in order to introduce my lovely wife and see my family.
Back home again I found a new job in Honeymoon Bay and I worked there till the mill shut down in 1981. In the meantime we bought some lakefront property and built a small cabin. Later on we saw some acreage for sale and bought it. We cleared the land, built a small sawmill and raised three children there.
In 1981 the mill shut down and the company arranged for a welding course for any employee that wanted to participate. I did and found that I really enjoyed welding. This allowed me to build all kinds of machines, some of which can be seen in the picture section of this book.
Here are some reader's comments: The book is well put together, easy to read and hard to put down. This is awesome, thank you for sharing it with us. There are lots of interesting stories in this book and it is well written.

During her teenage years, author Sharon E. Cathcart dreamed of working in the music business. She lived that dream for seven years, beginning at age 18. Unfortunately, she learned that sometimes dreams turn quickly to nightmares.