And I Thought Magazine Editing Was Crazy

I used to run a non-profit literary center, the great and Rasputin-like Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, back when it was the ultimate one-stop-shop for all Maine books. In the 1990s our wholesaling book distribution service supplied hundreds of titles to dozens of bookstores and libraries each year. I then drifted away from the book industry into magazines where I've been almost ever since. Recently, I've returned to the book world as an editorial director, and of course, as an author, and I've been doing a lot of catching up — a lot of catching up.

Needless to say, I found Daniel Menaker's assessment of the book editor's life sobering on all sorts of levels. One section of the article I found puzzling was Menaker's estimation of the total number of book readers in the U.S. If there are only a million or so, as he guesses, who bought those zillion copies of The DaVinci Code? No, seriously.

Ride-Along

I was fortunate to spend the afternoon on a ride-along with a local game warden. We patrolled his district and logged a few hours with a warden pilot flying low above the rolling hills of midcoast Maine, looking for signs of poachers. We saw many suspicious wheel tracks in remote fields and a handful of jury-rigged blinds recently built near beaver flowages. My neighborhood night-hunters are already getting the autumn itch, it seems.

Mostly, though, we spotted backwoods marijuana patches. Man, oh, man, did we find lots of pot. Just about every tract of woods seemed to contain a half-hidden cannabis garden. The wardens made notes of the locations of these secret stashes and made plans to stake them out in the coming days.

It was a gorgeous afternoon to be in the air — 600 feet above the ground, racing along at 125 miles per hour — and I didn't even get airsick despite the endless loop de loops. I owe the Maine Warden Service a debt for giving me the experience.

On to Bouchercon

I'll be attending the annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Indianapolis in October, and even though The Poacher's Son won't formally be published by Minotaur Books until April 27, 2010 (mark your calendars now), I expect to meet a few people who have read advance galleys of the novel. If you see a dazed looking guy with a Registered Maine Guide pin wandering through the crowded hotel hallways, it's probably yours truly. Either that or it's film director David Fincher who has the unmitigated gall to somewhat resemble me. Tell him I enjoyed Zodiac, will you?

Flooded Flagstaff

Over at my day job we have a reminiscence by writer Jane Lamb about her experiences as a schoolteacher in Flagstaff, one of Maine's lost towns, during the 1940s.

In 1949 the Central Maine Power Company (CMP) began building a dam at Long Falls on the Dead River in order to create a large, manmade lake north of the Bigelow Mountains. CMP wanted to generate hydroelectric power, and it needed this dam so it could release regular, controlled flows of water out of the impoundment to turn its electrical turbines downstream on the Kennebec River. Unfortunately for the residents of two villages that happened to be located in the Dead River valley, this massive public works project also involved the wholesale destruction of their communities. In 1949 the residents of Flagstaff and Dead River Plantation were evacuated. Their homes and businesses were relocated or burned to the ground. And within a few short months, these historic townships—founded by Benedict Arnold himself—were literally washed off the Maine map.

In The Poacher's Son I've taken the artistic liberty of raising the sunken villages from the bottom of Flagstaff Lake and restored them to dry land as if nothing had ever happened to them. One of the themes of the book is dislocation, and the story of Flagstaff's flooding had special resonance for me as I contemplated the many sweeping changes currently taking place in the Maine North Woods. 

Jane's essay offers some interesting insights into what it felt like to come of age in a town that no longer exists. You should read it.

Plum Creek Gets the Green Light

Maine's Land Use Regulation Committee, affectionately known in these parts as LURC, is recommending a controversial proposal by Plum Creek Timber to create the largest residential development in Maine history. This decision follows four years of heating public hearings, plans and counter plans, and dozens of newspaper and magazine op-eds. The Plum Creek proposal will develop a thousand house lots and create two large resorts on the shores of Moosehead Lake. The plan also protects thousands of acres in the region under conservation easements—although it keeps them as working forest. I have misgivings about the economic benefits Plum Creek is actually going to bring to the depressed area around Greenville (the thousand houses will certainly sell, but I doubt those resorts are going to prosper), but I'd be happy to be proven wrong since the development is now likely to move forward. I expect lawsuits to slow things down—and I won't be surprised if EarthFirst stirs up some mischief—but in the end Plum Creek will have its way. Watching this process unfold has been an eerie experience for me since it resembles, in many ways, the scenario I wrote about in The Poacher's Son. I hope in real life the outcome is less violent.