Hi all,

I am going to try and keep you updated on general interest information, itinerary stuff and anything else I can think of that you might like…

Many of you know that I did a podcast with Wayne and Brad on www.thegodjourney.com - you can find it there along with many other podcasts that are worth your time.  This is a great, fun and entertaining resource.

I taped another podcast that will be airing mid-August with the folks at Christianity without Religion http://www.ptm.org/cwr/ which is a sort of internet community/church and has a historical relationship to the Worldwide Church of God.  They publish The Plain Truth Magazine (which has come a long way from the old days), and their Sept/Oct issue (coming out in mid-August) will feature The Shack as the entire back cover (which I think is pretty fun).  They think their readership is about 100,000.  Hmmmm, we have about 8,000 books left from the first printing….hmmmmm

Next Tuesday, June 26th, I will be interviewed on local radio here in Oregon (KPDQ, the Georgene Rice Show) about the book.  I sort of know Georgene Rice from years ago…Kim knows her a lot better, but also from a long time ago.  For those who are able, the time of the interview on Tuesday will be 5PM - 93.7 FM in Portland, OR - translators elsewhere in the state.

The Byerly family is heading to the House2House Church conference in California and taking about 20 books to foist down there.

A believer’s community in Salem, OR, thanks to Dena and Mark, have a case of books that they are rampaging through and I am going down there to visit - I think on August 5th - just to see what kind of trouble I have stirred up…not really.  It will be very fun!!!

I think that I am doing my first book signing at a coffee house in Newberg, Oregon in the next few weeks - will keep you posted…thanks to Chyril and family.

Let me see…I have received emails from wonderful people all over the US and Canada, and from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the UK and Japan - folks who have already read the book…can you believe that?  This is soooo cool!

One of Oprah’s on-line book clubs selected The Shack as their June read and invited me as a guest to discuss it…what an incredible group of women and the conversation has been brilliant and open and a gift.

I am soon moving this site over to Joomla so that I can do more stuff, like upload some music, post images and documents and generally confuse myself even more…but they say it will be easier to manage and I am all for that.  The initial mock-ups are fun…they make me look really important, but as long as you and I know better we can enjoy the creativity and the joke.

I hear every single day from people whose lives are being touched and opened up by this little unassuming story - I am so grateful that I had no idea about any of this when I wrote the book - I am like the kid, wide-eyed in wonder, at their first glimpse of whale breaching or the Rocky Mountains, or…you get the idea.  I feel like I just had my first lesson in surfing and someone said, ‘Hey, why don’t you try that 40 foot wave over there.’  Glory to the One who loves us all.

-willie (William P Young)