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I was born within a few minutes' walk of the Wallace Monument in the village of Elderslie, in Renfrewshire, Scotland, and even as a small child I knew the story of Scotland's g

[Photo Courtesy of Kristina Taukkanen]

Sitting in the restaurant at my golf club this morning, having a late breakfast, I overheard a guy at another table telling a bad joke, and at the end of it one of his buds, pretending to be shocked, said very loudly, "We are Not amused!" Made me think of just how easily we can be misquoted nowadays and how difficult it can be to set the record straight afterwards...

I passed another major milestone this weekend and, as milestones tend to do, it fell behind me in silence, unremarked by anyone except me and my publisher's editorial staff... For an entire year, now, I have been working daily on writing, shaping and crafting another new novel, this one called "The Forest Laird", and my entire life, everything I have done during that time, has revolved around the progress or lack of progress in that endeavour. But now it's done. I sent it off to the publishers, all 230,000 words of it, on Thursday night.

This year, 2010, marks the 75th Anniversary of my main publisher, Penguin Books, Canada, or as they are legally known, Penguin Group Canada Inc. To celebrate the anniversary the Penguins are doing a couple of really neat things, one of which is inviting their top-selling authors to take part in a poster campaign in which each author is photographed with his own personal favourite book from the list published by Penguin Canada since its inception. The poster campaign will then run nation-wide, bringing, one hopes, great books to the attention of new readers.

I remember meeting Bob Dylan in a folk club at Brighton in the south of England in 1964, just when that song was the most talked-about song in the under 25-years-old English speaking world. I got to spend time quite a bit of time with him on  that occasion because I operated and owned the folk club in question, along with a close friend, Terry Masterson, who then lived in Twickenham, in Middlesex.

This is just a brief snippet, an afterthought prompted by a memo I just received about an upcoming event in Toronto within the next few months...

I have already written this blog entry today--or a reasonable facsimile of it--and then lost it somehow, before I could upload it. I don't know what I did, but I know I was not happy when whatever happened to it happened...

I've never really been sure of the lyrics of that line, or the actual title of the song, although I know it's the official march tune of the US Air Force. But whether the blue yonder we're dealing with here is wide or wild, or both, here we go, into it, with a brand-new format for the Official Jack Whyte Web Site.

It's been so long since I've been able to write anything in here that I'm kinda scared I might have lost the ability to do it at all... But let's give it a try and see what comes up...