News
Whenever I launch a new novel, I like to post a word cloud of the names and words I use most commonly in the book. It's my version of a teaser and alerts me to words I need to stop overusing (e.g. like)!
Here is the word cloud for Massacre Pond. I don't think it gives too much away:
My next novel won't be published until July 16, but John Holyoke, of the Bangor Daily News (BDN), is out with a glowing review of my most challenging and controversial novel yet:
Grant Doiron this: He’s got guts, taking on such hot-button topics as a North Woods National Park and the still officially unsolved Soldiertown moose massacre, and linking the pair together in a fictional work.
And that work is — as usual — masterful.
Doiron, who toils by day as the editor-in-chief of Down East magazine, has quickly become one of the state’s top literary properties. And in Massacre Pond — his fourth Mike Bowditch thriller — he raises the bar once again.
It's always rewarding to receive a great review, but as I've said before, it means even more when it's from a reviewer that knows Maine and the Maine Warden Service the way someone like John Holyoke does.
Thirty days from now, my fourth novel Massacre Pond will arrive in stores — and on e-readers.
I've always found this time in the publishing process to be the most stressful for me. Writing is easy. Waiting is hard. The advance reader copies are with reviewers, the book itself is at the printer, and there is nothing I can do but gather my forces for the long tour ahead.
Of course, waiting is frustrating for readers, too. If it's been months since you finished Bad Little Falls and you've been wondering what mischief Mike Bowditch could get into next, I do have some good news to tide you over until July 16.
Macmillan has posted an excerpt of Massacre Pond on its site. It's just the first chapter, but it's still a hint of what's to come for Maine's most trouble-prone game warden.
Over at the day job I have a new Editor's Note up about Maine's history as a haven for hermits. Long before Christopher Knight, the so-called North Pond Hermit, was grabbing headlines, there was "Naked Joe" Knowles and Walley and Olive Estes, the "Adam and Eve of the Maine Woods."
Those early turn-of-the-20th century hermits were publicity hounds of the first order, utterly unlike Christopher Knight who seems to have stumbled backward into fame (or infamy). As I write in my column:
For someone who wanted to disappear completely, Knight has now found himself inside a multimedia maelstrom that didn’t exist when he began his self-imposed exile. His story has been broadcast from Bangor to Buenos Aires to Brisbane. Meanwhile, the hermit sits behind bars in the Kennebec County Jail, awaiting trial on a handful of theft charges. He is said to be a model prisoner. So far, he has refused all media interviews.
How different from Walter and Olive Estes, who parlayed their two-month camping trip into fifteen minutes of fame. The photogenic couple made money selling pictures of themselves dressed in furs and appeared in vaudeville shows; Olive even wrote a book titled True Experiences, including Adam and Eve in the Maine Woods. It remains to be seen whether Knight will succumb to the inevitable pressure to cash in by selling the rights to his life. What seems clear is that Adam and Eve were far better adapted to this era of reality TV stars and celebrity wannabes than the most famous hermit of the new century.
Salon has an interesting interview up with Jaron Lanier, author of Who Owns the Future, in which he takes issue with the notion that technology is opening up a new utopia for everyone, especially creative people — a notion which is thoroughly refuted by just about every statistic we have on rising income inequality, I should add.
As an author, I was struck by this insightful observation:
Near the end of the book you talk about the changes in the book business. It doesn’t sound pretty. What’s going on there and what have you learned as someone who has now written several books?
I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.
To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.
I’m quite concerned that in the future someone might not know what author they’re reading. You see that with music. You would think in the information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you’re listening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearing it so you know what you’re listening to, but in truth it’s hard to get to those services.
I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.
I don't know about you, but I have that experience with music constantly now. I hear something I like and ask, "Who was that?" And even with Soundhound and all these digital tools, I never find out. And then I forget about the music.
