MADAWASKA, Maine — David Daigle, a Madawaska native, has three college degrees, worked in the nursing field and even opened his own chiropractic practice in coastal Oregon, where he and his wife also worked on fixing up their home. Amid all of this, he still found the time to write a massive four-volume fantasy anthology that spans 1,467 pages.
And though Daigle said the series was purely written for fun, he has made roughly $35,000 selling his books online, at his practice and in-person via booths set up at various events.
And while he shares a name with Madawaska’s current town manager, the author said that the two are not related.
He started writing as a freshman at Iowa State University, beginning with short stories and poetry. But Daigle submitted his work for evaluation to one of the school’s graduate students through a university program and received some discouraging feedback.
“The guy who evaluated my work said all my writing was no good,” Daigle said. “So I dropped it.”
But he later received some words of encouragement while working weekend nights at a rural hospital in Reedsport, Oregon.
“I don’t know how it came about, but one of the CNAs said, ‘Dave, you should write a book,’” Daigle said. “I didn’t agree at all; I was trying to establish a chiropractic business. I was working weekend nights, and we bought a house that was a fixer-upper.”
But the advice stuck with him, and on one lunch break he decided to try writing something.
“It just sort of started coming to me,” he said. “So I wrote it down and kept writing.”
Daigle said his novels are inspired by some of his favorite fantasy authors, including J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Glen Cook and Robert Jordan.
“I was introduced to fantasy through Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit,’” he said. “I like that anything is possible in fantasy. You can go places that you can’t go in other genres.”
He said one of his co-workers found out he was writing the novel, and started asking for a new chapter every weekend when Daigle showed up to work.
“She motivated me to keep writing,” Daigle said.
Once he finished the first novel of the anthology, “Prince of the Elves,” he showed it to a couple literature professors at a local college in his reading group. Daigle said they told him it was worth publishing, but he ultimately decided to self-publish the book.
“This was more like a project for fun,” he said. “I didn’t have any anticipation of anything happening to it.”
The book went on Amazon and he began selling it out of his chiropractic office, developing a small group of fans who would come to his office and ask when the next volume would be released. And as he started to promote his book on author forums, sales began to go up.
His process involves creating small points of where the story will go, but he said the characters seem to take control when he is in the middle of writing. He said this happened in one book in which he planned for a character to die.
“When I got to the point where I had planned to kill her off, everything changed and she lived,” he said. “That wasn’t part of my plan. It’s like the characters dictated where the story was going.”
Daigle stopped writing after the 2008 economic recession. He said he has not yet had inspiration to continue his anthology. When that inspiration does hit, he said it is all-consuming.
“I get absorbed in the writing and neglect everything else, including my wife,” he joked. “So I’ve got a lot going on.”
In 2012 he moved back to his hometown of Madawaska, which sits on the other side of the Canadian border. Daigle spent the first 35 years of his life in Madawaska. He said one aspect of his northern Maine youth that uniquely prepared him to be a writer was that, like many others in his hometown, he grew up speaking both French and English.
“I’ve always loved playing with words and sentences using both languages, flip-flopping from one to the other,” Daigle said.
If he could give any aspiring writers advice, it would be to never let anyone stop them from writing.
“What one person likes, another person hates,” he said. “So never let anyone get in your way of doing it.”
Daigle concluded with a phrase that he often includes in autographed copies of his books, “May all your journeys be magical.”
