My friend, Greg Drummond, was a finalist at yesterday's first World Championship Moose Calling Invitational in Oquossoc, Maine. Greg is a Master Maine Guide and probably the finest outdoorsman I know. He runs Claybrook Mountain Lodge in Highland Plantation with his lovely wife Pat, and he is responsible for many of the nature details you'll find in my books. I wish I'd had the good sense to head over to the Rangeley Lakes for this amusing event—especially since it might have helped hone my own sorry moose-calling skills—but congratulations to Greg on making it to the finals.
Why I Don't Self Publish
Over at MaineCrimeWriters.com I have a post about Jessica Park, the young adult writer who wrote an essay celebrating Amazon's self-publishing program and, in return, received a surprisingly lucrative gift from CEO Jeff Bezos. In my own essay I talk about why I haven't followed the same path, although I suspect we will increasingly see "name" authors eschewing traditional publishers and going the self-publishing route. I don't discuss the complicated future of booksellers in this Brave New World (that's for another day), but it bears remembering that, for the moment, bypassing traditional publishers also means bypassing brick and mortar stores. This decision comes with consequences, as Barry Eisler recently discovered.
My Next Book Tour Takes Shape
My wonderful publicist, Sarah Melnyk, at Minotaur Books is lining up readings and signings for later this summer to promote my new Mike Bowditch novel, Bad Little Falls. Today the first promotional materials arrived in my inbox. I'll be at the Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough, Massachusetts on Saturday, August 11. Check my calendar of events in the coming weeks for additional events, and I'll be posting the entire tour here when it's all official.
The Book for Bad Fathers
People always ask me if my dad was the inspiration for Jack Bowditch of The Poacher's Son. Happily, I can say that he was not. My father is one kindest men I know, and I enjoyed spending the day with him yesterday (our schedules were such that we had to celebrate Father's Day a day early).
I don't know where Jack came from entirely. The fathers of a couple of my boyhood friends were assholes. I remember confronting one of them over his own dinner table when he launched into a diatribe about how "the Jews control everything." I was ordered to leave the house immediately. I never returned.
When The Poacher's Son came out, it was placed on lots of those "For Father's Day" table displays you see in bookstores. This struck me as one of the most ironic acts of guerilla marketing I've ever seen. I often think about the many dads who received my first novel as a present and began to wonder, very quickly, whether their sons and daughters had just flipped them the bird. It's sort of the perfect gift for anyone whose dad was a jerk.
Full Moon
My wife Kristen Lindquist has her third poem on Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac." This one airs on Bloomsday (June 16, the date during which the event of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place).
The poem, "Full Moon," has nothing to do with Joyce or Dublin. What it concerns is the apartment we once shared in Rockland, Maine: the self-professed Lobster Capital of the World. It was the place where I started to write The Poacher's Son, in an "office" that was actually a closet big enough for me to squeeze a desk in beside the hot water heater.
Rockland was—and is—a gritty place. I had a memorable confrontation there with the city's drug kingpin. He ran the "bar that served anyone" that Kristen mentions in her poem, and I am proud to say that I did not back down from him. The last I heard he was serving a term in federal prison for his many crimes. "Full Moon" only hints at some of the nocturnal happenings she and I observed in Rockland. It wasn't Nighttown, but it was always an interesting place after the sun went down.