BELFAST, Maine — In a cozy downtown office with a standing workstation that offers an obstructed view of Penobscot Bay — cock your head to the left and you can see a sliver of it — author Paul Doiron is already working on his eighth novel.
Never mind that his seventh in the series of Mike Bowditch mysteries — “Widowmaker” — doesn’t arrive on store shelves until June 14. There’s always writing to be done, and a project to peck away at.
Doiron, who until two and a half years ago served as editor-in-chief of Down East magazine, said making a transition from spare-time novelist to full-time author has been a learning process.
“The embarrassing thing to admit is that I was much more productive when I was writing in my spare time at Down East,” the 51-year-old Doiron said with a laugh. “I’ve learned better work habits after [some time] on my own. When your day is essentially free, it seems like you can do anything. You find out that you really have to treat it like a job, which I do now.”
For a year after his initial foray into full-time writing, Doiron returned to the magazine once a week as a consultant. But for the last year and a half, he’s focused solely on being a novelist … and a husband.
“[Before], I would be writing in the mornings before I went to work. I would be writing on my vacations. I would be writing weekends,” he said. “My wife never saw me, it seemed, for years.”
And his life, now that he has become comfortable with the different rhythm that goes along with his solo career?
“It’s pretty great,” he said. “I’m very fortunate to have reached this place in my career, because there are only a handful of people in Maine who are able to do what I’m doing. Not a day goes by that I don’t have to remind myself that this is a pretty good place to have found myself … especially because it’s not just having the freedom to do the writing. It’s having the freedom to do the research.”
Doiron’s “Widowmaker” won’t disappoint fans of his series, which features fictional Maine game warden Mike Bowditch. Doiron, who sets each of his books in a specific month, chose January for “Widowmaker,” and returns Bowditch to the western mountains where he spent time as a child.
The decisions the author made in this book came naturally, Doiron said.
“I knew I wanted to write a winter book, because I hadn’t written one for a while,” Doiron said. “And another [part of the decision] was that I described Mike’s father in the early books as a womanizer, and my friend Monica Wood, the novelist, had said, ‘Gee, it seems like he should have a half-brother out there somewhere.’”
Doiron agreed.
“So I said, ‘What if it’s a story about him discovering he has this sibling that he never knew about, and it was from the piece of Maine that he had left when his parents had gotten divorced, which was up in the mountains around Sugarloaf and the Bigelows and Rangeley.’”
That setting allowed Doiron to explore what he calls the “transient communities” that exist in ski towns. That culture plays a key role in ramping up the tension as Bowditch struggles to figure out who he can trust, and what’s really going on in the mountains of Maine.
“Widowmaker” also continues to show Bowditch’s progression from a headstrong, impetuous young warden whose own actions consistently aggravate his bosses into a more mature but still imperfect man.
Doiron said that after writing his first novel, “The Poacher’s Son,” he quickly realized that Bowditch had to change.
“As far as I was concerned, that might be the only book that I would ever write,” Doiron said. “As soon as it became a series, I realized that nobody was going to stay with this character for seven books. I had to start maturing him from book to book.”
Although Bowditch continues to step on toes and remains independent, Doiron has succeeded in his long-term plan for his protagonist.
“The series, essentially, is Mike Bowditch growing up, both personally and professionally,” Doiron said. “I hope he still feels like the same man, but he is getting good at his job, and he’s not causing trouble for his superiors. He’s still kind of doing this his own way, but there’s nothing [in ‘Widowmaker’] that would get him in the [newspaper].”
Two weeks before “Widowmaker” hits shelves, Doiron is excited. But as he points out, a novelist’s work is never really done.
He’s already working on the book that’s expected to hit shelves a year from now … and he’s willing to share a little sneak peak. Kind of.
“My initial idea — and this may not be what people see next year — is to try to do something set on the Saco River during the party season, because that is a crazy, crazy phenomenon that wardens deal with, and it’s unlike anything I’ve written about so far,” Doiron said. “It’s a part of the state that I haven’t written about, and between all of the alcohol and other substances [that canoeists take with them], and the water, it’s sort of ripe for drama, melodrama.”
A “Widowmaker” launch party will be held at the Camden Public Library from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 14. Doiron will also have a signing, question-and-answer session and reading at Longfellow Books in Portland from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 15. For a more complete list of events, go to pauldoiron.com/events/
