« The Backstory: The Bridge to Caracas by Stephen Douglass »
Stephen Douglass is a retired oilman from Waterloo, Ontario. He started working with Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell, and retired after selling his own small oil company in 1989. He and his wife summered in Muskoka, Ontario and wintered in Port St. Lucie, Florida. One summer, he discovered he had a story to tell…
Stephen: For me, writing was an accident. I had never witten anything, other than several long essays in university. When my friends in Muskoka and Florida, my homes in obscurity, became aware of the story of my incredible life in the Canadian oil business, they encouraged me to commit it to writing. They were shocked when I told them the story of the most audacious crook I ever knew, of how he managed to steal $325,000,000 from the Canadian and U.S. Feds, and of how my association with him nearly cost me my business, my love, and my life. They insisted it was a story that must be told.
Reluctantly, I did, but it took a Muskoka rain to get me started. I was compelled to cancel another in my endless series of ridiculously bad golf games, and was faced with virtually nothing to do. Cleaning the cottage would have made my wife happy, but I wasn’t inspired. Watching television was a reasonable alternative until the intensity of the storm obliterated our satellite signal. Undaunted, I picked up my book du jour and started to read. That activity ended when a tree fell on our power line, terminating all electricity.
By candlelight and a roaring blaze in the fireplace, I picked up a writing pad and started to write the story of my life, long hand. I had no idea how much fun it would be until I did it. Writing the story was like living it, all over again. After more than twenty years the story was finally made public. It is the story of an endless and conflicted love and one of the largest and most audacious thefts in Canadian and U.S. history. If readers have half as much fun reading about my life as I did living it, they will be enriched.
The store I wrote is entitled The Bridge to Caracas, for reasons that will quickly be obvious to readers; it’s a romance crime novel. The sequel, The Tainted Trust (what happened to the $325,000,000) will be published soon and I am actively writing the third book in the King trilogy, Kerri’s War, a thrilling epic chronicling the pursuit of love and money, and spanning four tumultuous decades.
The Bridge to Caracas: Amazon | iBookstore
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Reader Comments (2)
Great back story. Just one question. Is the book fiction or real life that reads like fiction?
Great question. My best answer to it is that the story is faction. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.