Out of Dark Waters: Forgiveness, Friendship, & Philosophy
Out of Dark Waters is Jason Stigliano’s classic fantasy debut about a band of adventurers encountering a mysterious, deadly power during their travels. Now that the hunter has their scent, it will pursue them until its ends are met. Welcome to our first interview with Jason where we chat about OoDW and some of the book’s inspirations.
Orange: Could you describe Out of Dark Waters in a line or two?
Jason: So, firstly, thanks so much for reading and talking to me about the book! In a line or two…I would describe it as a high fantasy adventure, carrying a bit of nostalgia for 80’s and 90’s fantasy. It has a focus on themes of forgiveness, friendship and redemption, but at times against some relatively dark backdrops.
O: What inspired you to write this particular book, especially with this set of themes?
J: I started writing it, I think, when I was 35, and it had begun to dawn on me that I wasn’t exactly a young guy anymore. Not old, not even middle-aged, really. But I think that in, say, one’s early 20s, we tend to feel like the world is spread out before us, and we have all the time in the world. But by then, though I’d had wonderful things happen in my life, I’d also been around long enough that some paths were closed to me, and (as I think happens for everyone over time) there were both accomplishments and mistakes that became core to who I was. I think the nostalgic elements were motivated partly by this. I was also interested in the idea that accepting all of what comes to define us, not just what we’re most proud of, is an important part of living in the world.
O: How long ago was this?
J: Let’s see…I remember it took me two years and a day to finish the draft of Out of Dark Waters. So, I would have begun it a bit more than two and a half years ago.
O: I definitely got a sense that "accepting what got to define us" was a major part of the narrative. I'm not sure how much you're comfortable sharing, but maybe you can share a bit about how what you've experienced in life has colored the journies your characters go on in OoDW (especially Vander).
J: Well, let’s see how I do here without oversharing! I think that part of what spurred my interest was run-of-the-mill stuff that happens as we get older. We lose touch or fall out with people. We move to new places and leave others behind. We’re inevitably stuck with memories of times when we could have treated others better, or could have been kinder to ourselves. To my mind, that’s all an unavoidable part of the human experience.
I should say that, in real life, I’m very lucky to have never experienced anything like the violence that Vander suffered, or the moral trauma that Maggy put herself through. What I think I share with them, at times, is a tendency to tell stories that don’t actually help me. (Mild Spoilers.) Vander would rather think of himself as a coward than accept that something really bad happened to him, which he couldn’t control. Maggy would prefer to straightforwardly blame herself, than accept any moral ambiguity about her past actions. (That’s my reading of the characters, at least.) This is probably something that almost everyone does, but (with my page count as evidence) I may be slightly more prone to story-telling than normal.
Maybe the most recent and concrete thing is that I spent around a decade training to be a philosophy professor, but I realized near the end that I no longer felt called to philosophy, and I left that career behind. It was very tempting to tell a simplified story, where either my studies had made me who I was regardless, or where I had wasted years on a discipline I would no longer use, when I could have been doing something else (writing fantasy, for instance). The truth is, of course, an ambiguous mix of the two, but that’s harder to sit with.
If there was one character that I felt closest to, it may have been Orin, propelled by his desire to remake himself. I think, on some level, Orin’s drive to become a wizard drew partly on my desire to write a fantasy novel.
One of the things I’ve always felt that fantasy does well is present heightened scenarios, which can, at the safe distance of an imagined realm, hold a microscope to our own more ordinary concerns. So (if you can believe it), I’ve never been attacked by a dragon, or worked as an assassin in a war for the underworld. But, as both a reader and writer of fantasy, I tend to approach the genre as a way to examine my own sentiments recontextualized and intensified in such a way that it makes the stakes more visible to me.
O: You mentioned you had a background in philosophy. What happened there, and did it affect your writing aspirations in some way?
J: I came to philosophy in my late teens and was really driven by an interest in the core traditional questions of philosophy, with the hope that there were answers to be found. What is it to live a meaningful or moral life? Is it possible to overcome fundamental Cartesian doubts about our knowledge? Looking back on it, I must have been kind of an odd kid, with these things at the forefront of my mind. They felt like urgent questions. The more I studied philosophy, though, the more I concluded that there simply weren’t definite, logically discernable answers. Doubts about our purpose, morality, and knowledge are things we have to live with. So, I became increasingly disinterested in philosophy as an academic research discipline. Though I still valued it deeply as a teaching discipline, I didn’t want to spend my life doing the academic writing and publishing required to sustain a teaching career.
Before focusing on philosophy, I had done a lot of fiction (and poetry) writing. My earlier teenage years were littered with one-third completed fantasy novels. I mostly set those things aside, because, at the time, I felt that they were less serious pursuits. Leaving philosophy opened those possibilities back up to me, which was very freeing. Actually, one of the first things I did afterward was start playing D&D, which quickly reminded me how much I love fantasy as a genre. At the same time, I think that the years I spent in philosophy helped me to become more intellectually disciplined, expanded my ability to develop large-scale writing projects, and made me a little more thoughtful about the stories I wanted to tell.
I've also been told by my D&D friends that some of my more eccentric worldbuilding reminds them that I used to do philosophy.
O: Which worldbuilding elements did your D&D friends mention specifically?
Also, I just wanted to mention that I read your author's note and saw you were heavily influenced by tabletops. I have to admit I'm not very familiar with this space, but it's really fascinating to me how games like D&D seem to have influenced a large group of writers.
J: The setting I used for OoDW actually is derived from the world I developed for tabletop games. (This includes D&D, but also Frostgrave and Pathfinder. I’ve been wanting to use it for Dark Ages Cthulhu too, but I haven’t quite gotten there.) A fun aspect of writing this way is that there is a lot of pre-established worldbuilding for me to play with when I approach a story. If I recall, one of the lore-elements that inspired my friend’s comment is that the setting’s equivalent of elemental planes are one-dimensional threads that are woven together to form the material world. You can visit them, but the experience will probably drive you mad, without sufficient fortitude of mind. This was inspired partially by the Kantian idea that time, space, and causation are not fundamental features of the universe, but structures that our minds apply to experience as a pre-condition for thought. In sort of the same way, if you visit one of these places, your mind needs to provide the spatial structure for you to function there.
Tabletop games started influencing me before I was even specifically familiar with them. The Dragonlance Chronicles are absolutely core to my love of fantasy, in particular the kind of high fantasy world that OoDW is set in. I devoured that series when I was fourteen and fifteen, and I had no idea that it was basically a D&D novelization. I think that, more than any other work except perhaps The Lord of the Rings, it was Dragonlance that made me want to write fantasy when I was younger.
O: What was it about those novels that particularly drew you to fantasy?
J: Part of it, probably, is that I was fourteen, and the Dragonlance books are quite action-packed. While they do have quieter moments, you never have to wait long to see something really cool happen. If you’re a kid who wants to see dragons, and wizards, and swordfights, they will absolutely show you the dragons, and so forth.
But the books also balance their propulsive storytelling with underlying mysteries about the characters and their motivations, as well as an incredible sense of place. There are locations in Krynn (the world of Dragonlance) where, even remembered twenty years later, I feel like I could step right into them.
I'm rereading them currently, for the first time in decades, and I've been surprised by the emotional complexity the characters often display, which I wasn't as aware of when I read them at fourteen.
O: I've got just one more question for you: What's next for you in writing?
J: I’m working on a couple of projects right now. One is an older book, which I began several years ago and didn’t quite finish. I would estimate that there are around five chapters left to draft, though once I’m done, it will certainly require intensive editing. It’s the story of a necromancer and an undead servant bound to him by his late father. It revolves around the question of whether he can hold on to the kind of person he wants to be, or whether his obligations (real and imagined) will lead him down a different, darker path. The likely title of that project is The Knight and the Necromancer.
The other is a new story in the same world as Out of Dark Waters. At some point, I would like to return to Vander and his friends. This one follows a different set of characters, though, on a quest to recover certain objects of value from a dragon’s hoard. Whereas, in OoDW, Vander and company begin the story as a relatively tight-knit group, this party are all on the journey for their own reasons and don’t necessarily trust each other at the outset. The adventure also spans a much larger area of the setting, which has made it a lot of fun for me to work on. I’m getting to take the reader to some more unusual places and let my imagination run wild(er). The very tentative working title for that one is The Mist Covered Mountains, for the Scottish traditional song of the same name.
Outside of fiction, I’m partway through reconstituting my worldbuilding blog as a hub for my author activities. I’m also hoping to have a newsletter and an Instagram account (centered on miniature painting) active in the next month or so.
O: Thanks for taking the time to chat! Where can people find you if they want to stay in the loop, find your work, or support you?
J: Thank you so much for inviting me to talk! I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to discuss my writing and where it came out of. Out of Dark Waters is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Out-Dark-Waters-Jason-Stigliano-ebook/dp/B0D6WGDMPZ
My blog (under a certain amount of reconstruction) is: https://jasonstigliano.blogspot.com
If all goes according to plan, a newsletter and Instagram will be discoverable through my blog soon!