Douglas Gosselin Interview Published on: 02, Sep 2025

I spent years writing plans no one hoped to execute. Fiction, oddly enough, felt more honest. Strategy and history share the same skeleton: consequence. My time in uniform and in government showed me how decisions made in silence ripple outward, reshaping nations and lives. Historical fiction lets me trace those ripples back to their source and sometimes forward into our present.

Family ghosts are persuasive. My ancestor Gabriel Gosselin was deported in 1755; his name appears on a ship manifest that carried him south, eventually to Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. That was not just history, it was inheritance. The Great Derangement was less about armies than about ordinary families erased from ledgers. Another ancestor, Clément, left letters now housed in the Library of Congress, which I uncovered through genealogical research. One voice survived on paper, the other on a manifest. Writing through the Acadian lens gave me a chance to honor both, and to ask how exile reshapes identity across generations.

It means I do not write marble statues. History is alive, contested, and inconvenient. Who remembers, who forgets, and who controls the record, that is where the real story lies. I write into those fractures, where silence does as much work as speech. My approach is to enter through the silences in documented history, asking what is plausible or even likely when the record falls quiet. That is where hidden lives and untold motives come into focus.

Compartmentalization trains you to carry truths you cannot speak. Fiction lets me unpack the suitcase without handing over classified contents. I can write about loyalty, betrayal, or the moral cost of obedience without redacting half the page in black ink.

I never bend facts, but I do arrange them. Think of it as stage lighting: the set is historically accurate, the costumes authentic, but I decide where to shine the lamp. Sometimes silence in the record is the most revealing source, because it gives fiction room to breathe without lying.

In uniform, you learn quickly that loyalty can save your life or take it. Survival is never abstract. And freedom, it is always unfinished. I carried those truths across continents. Fiction just lets me give them names, faces, and voices.

Everywhere I have been, people want the same three things: safety, dignity, and a chance for their children. Conflict grows out of who gets denied which. I have seen it in souks, ministries, and burned-out villages. That perspective keeps me from writing cardboard villains, because every character thinks they are fighting for something just.

Blame boredom and paranoia. After enough time around algorithms, I realized they are not neutral, they are authors. Pair that with narrative warfare and a co-author with a name as improbable as Dr. Signolés, and suddenly I had a thriller where the manuscript itself fights back. It is a love letter and a warning label at once.

Wars used to be fought with steel and powder. Now they are fought with code and perception. In False Foreword, the weapon is not a missile, it is the narrative itself. That is not speculation; it is where strategy is already heading. The battlefield is your mind.

Liberating, yes. Safe, not always. Fiction lets me speak without footnotes or clearance officers. I can finally put on the record what silence taught me: sometimes the loudest truths are the ones no one dares to say aloud.

Hilary Mantel taught me precision. Graham Greene taught me moral ambiguity. Alan Furst gave me atmosphere, and Viet Thanh Nguyen showed me how memory itself can be a character. I have stolen ruthlessly from them all, and hopefully paid homage in the process.

Even in the military, writing requires creativity, it just cannot sound creative. That disguise mechanism was the perfect training ground for fiction. I started with reconnaissance reports that were cryptographic by necessity, then police-style reports of crime scenes that demanded clarity but no flourish. Later, as a contracting officer and acquisitions analyst, I wrote to persuade, and that is where creativity began to creep in. So the transition was not a single leap, it was a lifelong shift from writing to conceal, to writing to reveal.

The only real routine is coffee, black dark roast Peet’s, and then I sit down at the computer to pick up where I left off. I do this seven days a week, unless life pulls me away. Most days I am writing, researching, or marketing for ten to twelve hours without noticing how much time has passed. It was not always like this, but once I retired and my consulting work ended, I committed fully. Now it feels less like a routine and more like the work I was meant to do.

The fact that I am only now answering this question shows how little I let get in the way when I have a story to tell. I am about to launch Doctrine of Shadows, the third book in the Secrets of the Republic series, but Phantom Patriot was book two, and I loved writing it because it became the origin story of Mr. Smith. If Pawn was about inheritance and Doctrine was about silence, then Phantom Patriot was about origin. It reveals the Republic’s intelligence roots, not as the polished agencies we know today, but in their raw beginnings. Readers can expect betrayal, shadow alliances, and a tone that is more personal and more unnerving. It is the book where the mask is made and where it begins to crack.

AllAuthor has been a solid partner. The platform helps me reach readers I might not otherwise find and creates a sense of community in what is often seen as solitary work. Some of the automated features are useful, others I adapt to my own style, but overall it has given me visibility and support. Writing may look lonely from the outside, but I value solitude, and AllAuthor provides a balance by connecting that solitude to a wider community.