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Author’s Note
Thank you for downloading “The Celebration of Johnny’s Yellow Rubber Ducky.” I hope you enjoyed it. If you liked the story or got something valuable out of it, please leave a review for it on your preferred retailer’s website, and tell others what you thought about it, and let me know what you liked (or didn’t like) about it. I appreciate all feedback and support from readers. Thank you.
A Brief History: This story began with my mission to prove a point. In 2006, I was corresponding with a friend through e-mails, and in one e-mail she suggested that I laughed more. Because most of our communication was through e-mails, it was pretty easy to miss the fact that I laughed plenty. But to prove the point that my sense of humor was perfectly fine, I wrote a series of loosely connected stories about seven people who had a silly adventure with a rubber duck. It began with an introduction talking about how the story is one hundred percent true, except for the parts that were completely made up, and you get the idea. The end result was unspectacular, but I felt I had made my point. My sense of humor hasn’t malfunctioned, thank you very much.
Now, at the time, I was preparing the third volume of my Collection of Junk series, and I had planned on ending the short story section with the eighth story, “Waterfall Junction” (which I plan to convert to an e-book in April 2016), but I realized that “The Celebration of Johnny’s Yellow Rubber Ducky” was short enough to sneak in at the tail end of the section, so I spit-shined it and stuck it in the book. There still wasn’t much of a story there, but it was a fun collection of short shorts that linked to each other to form a greater narrative.
That was nine years ago, and in that time I’ve reevaluated what makes a story worth reading. As much as I’ve always liked the idea behind “The Celebration of Johnny’s Yellow Rubber Ducky,” I wasn’t sure how much I liked the execution, even then. Because it was written to prove a point, I never really bothered with revising it beyond its initial purpose. But now that I’m dusting these old stories off, I figured it was worthwhile to revisit the heart of the story and see if there was something more I could do to turn it into a story filled with conflict and actual adventure. So, that’s why the narrative part of the story is much, much larger than its original version, which had consisted of maybe four or five paragraphs under the heading “The Present.” The revision actually increased the story’s size by nearly three times. So, you’re basically getting a brand new story with this version. I hope you enjoyed it.
Oh, and a note about the grammar: I’m an American writer, but I like to try to stay authentic to the writing styles of whichever culture the narrator belongs to, so that’s why you’ll sometimes see the British spelling of “realize” (“realise”) and variations of it when the characters speak or when they write their parts of the duck’s adventure. It’s not an oversight. When you do see “realize,” “apologize” or anything of that nature spelled the American way, it’s probably in a section where I’m acting as narrator, not one of the seven. The only exception is in describing the graduation standards for Oxford University (second-class “honours,” for example). I figured that one deserves preservation since that’s how anyone would spell it in Oxford. So, there’s a note for you on that. If the speaker uses the American spelling in his letter, than he or she is probably American.
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