(CNN) -- The American man who pretended to blog as a gay Syrian-American woman, sparking an international incident, said Monday he regrets the damage he caused -- and has people to apologize to. In a Skype interview with the British paper The Guardian, Tom MacMaster said he had created the fake online identity "because it's hard" to write from that perspective, and he considered it "a challenge." The blog "A Gay Girl in Damascus" drew worldwide attention, particularly when it posted last week that the blogger, "Amina Abdallah," had been abducted.