Ask the Author: Doug Macdougall
Answered Questions (3)
Doug Macdougall
I have a long list of book ideas. The problem is to find the time to pursue them all. But some ideas percolate up to the top of the list, and the idea for 'Diamond Men,' a novel and my most recent book, was one of those. I had been fascinated by the story of Bre-X, a gold-mining company that in the 1990s claimed to have discovered the world's largest gold deposit in Indonesia. Its stock price soared, a few investors became millionaires - and then the whole thing collapsed and many more investors lost large amounts of money. It turned out to be a scam, the assay samples 'salted' with introduced gold. A great story for a geologist, but I didn't want to reproduce a true tale as fiction. But what about a scam in the diamond mining industry instead? Canada, my native land, experienced a diamond boom at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty first. A good friend, an expert on diamonds, kept me up to date on the latest developments. Maybe it would be fun to write a novel about fraud in the diamond industry. Thus was born 'Diamond Men.'
Doug Macdougall
I currently have two book projects on the go, one non-fiction and the second a novel. Both are in early stages so I don't want to go into detail here except to say that the novel is set in California in the present, and the non-fiction book is a departure from my previous strictly geology oriented books in that it is partly historical and exploration-based.
Doug Macdougall
This is not an easy question to answer because there are so many good things to say about being a writer. Here's just one 'best thing,' and it relates to my recent novel, Diamond Men. Until I tackled this book I had only written non-fiction. Switching to fiction was, for me, a challenge. But what I loved about it was the absolute surprise at seeing the characters emerge and grow and evolve as the writing progressed. At times it was almost like an out-of-body experience: the characters were the product of my imagination but I felt like an observer watching over their lives. There were days when I couldn't wait to sit down at the computer and find out what they were going to do next.
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