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Another good review today for The Poacher's Son, this one from Romantic Times magazine:
Doiron’s impressive debut is told through the eyes of the suspect’s estranged son. This is a literate tale of revenge, love and loyalty that uses the mysterious Maine woods as both a motive for the crime and a knob for ratcheting up the suspense. Though the prose is sometimes flat-footed, there are plenty of twists and surprises to keep the reader guessing until the very end. ★★★★
In The Poacher's Son I try to depict some of the many strange jobs Maine game wardens are asked to perform during the course of their shifts. From today's Portland Press Herald comes this one:
Game wardens in Maine say a moose is back in the woods thanks to some human help it got after it broke through the ice on Moose Pond in the town of Bridgton.
Wardens say the bull moose was spotted about 1,000 feet from shore on Sunday after it had broken through the ice...
[They] were able to put a rope around the neck of the moose and break it a path through the ice to shore.
I could make any number of wisecracks about the moose being rescued from Moose Pond, but I'm not going to.
When you have a new novel coming out, you never know what the day will bring. Today I received this extremely cool email:
A wonderful bouquet of nominations has been received for those titles that Indie booksellers will be happily handselling in May and beyond. I'm pleased to inform you that the following St. Martin's Minotaur title has been designated as an Indie Next List Notable for May, and will appear with jacket image and full bookseller quote in a downloadable PDF file to be posted on Bookweb.org. The bookseller quotes for the Notables titles will also be available as downloadable shelftalkers on Bookweb.org.: THE POACHER'S SON: A Novel, Paul Doiron, 9780312558468, $24.99
Congratulations!
So I decided to feed The Poacher's Son into a cool program called Wordle that creates word clouds. The way it works is that the size of the words reflects how often I use them in my novel. The bigger the word, the more often it appears in the book. I was surprised by the results. For instance, I would have expected the name "Kathy" to be larger. But it's interesting to see my story rendered in cloud form. Does it give the plot away? You tell me.
Laura Miller has an instructive piece on Salon that I wish she'd published back when I was in grad school. I remember lots of discussions at Emerson about the craft of writing, but I recall very few conversations about what readers want from a piece of fiction. Miller's essay, "A Reader's Advice to Writers," is full of good counsel if you aspire to write novels or short stories. You should read the whole thing, but her five bullet points are useful tips in and of themselves:
1. Make your main character want something.
2. Make your main character do something.
3. The components of a novel that readers care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, atmosphere/setting.
4. Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can't recognize "good writing" or don't value it that much.
5. A sense of humor couldn't hurt.
Worth pinning over the writing desk.
