Jack’s Blog

It's been a while since I added anything here, but I have a couple of topics bubbling at the back of my mind and I'll apply myself to posting them next week, as soon as I get to the end of this seemingly interminable book tour, which has been busy enough and hectic enough but…

A couple of days ago, in preparation for my upcoming book tour to promote the new novel, The Forest Laird, my publicity people at Penguin Canada asked me to write a "remote" blog entry for inclusion on the website of one of the better-known independent book stores I'll be visiting in the course of my…

Cathy, one of our longest-standing contributor/members (if not the sole claimant to that title) asked me a few days ago about a review I wrote back in 2007 for “The Religion” by Tim Willocks. The novel, a 627-page tome published in the USA by Sarah Crighton Books [Farrar Strauss Giroux] and in Canada by Douglas…

Seems like a long time since I last entered anything here, but it's only been a week. I've noticed, though, that weeks pass very quickly, nowadays, so much so that I sometimes find myself wondering where all the Mondays through Thursdays went, because all that seems to be left is Fridays… The last time I…

I’m heading off to BC’s Sunshine Coast next weekend (August 12-15) to attend the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, in Sechelt, and to me that means High Summer and the opening of the annual LitFest and Conference season. I realized that while sitting at my computer early this morning, going through old files,…

One of the best parts of being a writer, as far as I’m concerned, is that sometimes you get sneak previews of books that really excite you, and this is the time of year when people send me ARCs (Advance Readers’ Copies)  in the mail, hoping that I’ll read them and enjoy them and then…

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 greatest Champion. All Scots kids did, of course, but living as close to the Monument as I did, I always had a special awareness…

  Courtesy of Kristina Taukkanen Having recently finished my new novel, “The Forest Laird, A Tale of William Wallace“, I’ve been luxuriating in the fact that it’s done, but I recalled, in a conversation with a friend a few nights ago, that  I did not come easily to writing about Wallace originally, because the man…

Sitting in the restaurant at my golf club this morning, having a late breakfast, I overheard a guy at another table telling a really 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…

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…