News
Bruce Tierney writes the Whodunit column for BookPage, and he just made my day with this review. It concludes on a high note:
The setting is wildly atmospheric, the pacing swift and the characters well drawn. The Poacher’s Son is easily one of the best debut novels in recent memory.
If you told me I'd receive a notice like this back when I was first starting my novel, I never would have believed you.
I've been on the go since I got back from New York and haven't had a moment to blog about this, but I spent a long but wonderful day last week in Manhattan meeting with my publishers, Minotaur Books. Headquartered in the Flatiron Building (above), Minotaur is an imprint of St. Martin's Press. It was my last publicity outing before the official book launch.
My schedule was jam-packed almost from the moment I arrived at LaGuardia: lunch with executives from Barnes & Noble at a place called Rye House (I recommend the blackened striped bass sandwich); a session signing several hundred copies of The Poacher's Son that had been special-ordered by mystery booksellers; recording an author interview to accompany the release of the audio version of the book; meeting with my editor to discuss final revisions on my second, as-yet-untitled novel; and finally trading stories with Minotaur staffers and fellow authors, Andrew Grant and Tasha Alexander, over Italian small plates.
It was only the next day, as I was waiting at LaGuardia for the plane to take me back to Portland, that I realized I'd just had the experience aspiring novelists always dream about. Don't think I wasn't grateful.
I have a new Editor's Note up over at the day job, this one discussing my tendency to pick up a local book whenever I'm on the road. It occurs to me now that if people follow my sage advice, a few travelers might be touring Maine this summer with a copy of The Poacher's Son in hand. I'm not sure whether the folks at the Maine Department of Tourism will consider that a good or a bad thing.
Sorry for the slow blogging. With the May 11 publication day of The Poacher's Son approaching fast, life has been a mad scramble to the finish line.
Thanks to Matt Yglesias, I came across this short but challenging first aid quiz today. It's worth taking the test as a basic refresher. Registered Maine Guides are required to be certified in first aid, but I've learned that it never hurts to brush up on this information regularly since you never know when you'll need it. For instance, the recommended guidelines for administering CPR — the ratio of compressons to rescue breaths, specifically — changed a while back.
How well did you score?
One of the ironies of my life is that the modest success I have achieved writing about the Maine outdoors has made it harder and harder for me to actually get outside. I won't say I'm chained to my desk, but you get the idea.
Open water fishing season (as opposed to ice fishing season) begins on April 1, but this afternoon was the first opportunity I've had to take my fly rod down to the little river that runs behind my house. As always happens on my first trip out, I discovered that the riverbed had changed over the winter. The early spring floods had carved a deeper overhang on my side of the Megunticook and uprooted a big tree across the way. The waters had pushed tangles of birch branches against the midstream boulders. And the mud bank was littered with flotsam and jetsam: a bass fishing lure (missing the hook), the amber shards of broken antique bottles, a plastic worm container.
In April I fish for big rainbow trout that sometimes drop down out of the lake about two miles upstream, but today I got skunked. I can't say I put much effort into my fishing, though. Mostly I worked to recover the muscle memory of my fly casting and watched a phoebe flit amid the alders. It rained for a while and then the sun briefly appeared before the clouds closed in again.
As I stood on the riverbank, I wondered about the little changes I was seeing in the landscape and who else had noticed them. Probably no one. That's the way it is with so many things in life. We are what we pay attention to. Today, I was the river.
