Author Spotlight with Daniel Pyne in Los Angeles Magazine

How much of your brother’s mining experience made it into Hole in the Ground?
“Inspired by” is the best version. The kind of technical details of it are based on his experience—specific things like my memories of standing outside the mine and smelling the pines. I only went there a couple times to hear stories of things that happened. ... It was free research. It was the experience of seeing him, the sort of humorous part of my brother buying this gold mine, that inspired me to write this very different story about a man who buys a gold mine on eBay.What’s your brother think of the book?
He’s pretty amused by it. He’s been reading it. He wrote me an email saying, “It’s exactly the way I remembered it.” My brother’s very dry. Why does the character of Lee buy a gold mine?
Not because of midlife crisis. He does it because he’s looking for mystery that has vanished from his life, the joy of discovery, the joy of the unknown. Everything that’s happened to him over the past few years in terms of his regular life has been kind of a downer for him. He’s stuck in this rut. He buys it not even with the intention of finding gold. As it says in the book, the gold is not the point. The point is the pursuit of the gold, it’s adventure. Hyperlink: LAMag.com