Dan Fitzgerald

Welcome to the last interview of 2021! December has been particularly special for Dan Fitzgerald and I. We have collaborated multiple times on the blog with Dan sharing about the Making of a Hardcover, The Isle of a Thousand Worlds cover reveal, my review of The Living Waters and now, today’s interview! Take a look below at the book we are discussing and then dive into the world of the Living Waters. 🙂

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Hi Dan! Welcome back to Armed with A Book. It is a pleasure to host you today. For my readers who might be meeting you for the first time, tell us about yourself. What’s your first memory associated with writing?

In elementary school I wrote what was essentially a Where the Red Fern Grows fanfic called Chestnut: The Story of a Boy and his Dog who Loved Each Other. We hand wrote them and bound them in art class.

I felt that the magic of The Living Waters is portrayed from the very start in the synopsis itself. How did the idea of this book begin for you?

After I finished the Maer Cycle, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go next. I half considered writing a memoir of my trip on a log raft on the Mississippi River when I was 13 (blog post here if anyone wants to read about it), but I was like, nah, I should do a fantasy log raft trip instead. 

It was originally going to be Sasha and Tcheen from my previous trilogy, exploring another continent, but I thought it might be better to start fresh, while still keeping it faintly connected somehow. I set up the South of the continent in my trilogy to be this barbaric place, only that was all propaganda and it was actually far more civilized than the north. So I thought, what kind of civilization? And then I wrote this scene with this guy getting his face painted and that’s how I got started. 

The nobles in the world in The Living Waters go on a roughabout. How did this custom come to be?

I had this idea of this very cloistered society, where they stay inside most of the time because of their fragile skin, but I thought maybe just once in their lives they’d have to get out there and mix it up, like some Amish and Mennonites with their Rumspringa. Plus, it got them out the door into a ready made adventure platform.

I found it quite fitting that Sylvan, a doctor in life sciences would be fascinated by a book written by a scholar and critiqued by another in the margins, while going on a roundabout that ends up challenging his understanding of the world. I loved his thirst for knowledge and the many times Temi and him sat reading and discussing the book. Why were Temi and Sylvan chosen to pair up for this roundabout?

These characters just kind of happened. With Sylvan it started with the face painting scene, and I realized he was super rich and cultured, and I started thinking of this book his mother was going to give him about the Living Waters. His being a scientist fit the theme growing in my mind of exploring the wilderness, so it just stuck.

With Temi, I knew she was going to be the opposite: poor (for a painted face), unhappy, and longing for escape. But I didn’t know anything else until I wrote her first scene, the naked tunnel walk, and then we met her mother and it all fell into place. Her being an artist was truly an accident of the mind; the main thing I knew was, she had an iron will that contrasted with her physical frailty. 

Roughabout pairings are made by a secretive entity, but two of the prime factors are personality compatibility and sexual non-compatibility. We can’t have the painted faces pairing up on a roughabout, since their society practices something close to arranged marriages by money and skin tone (the lighter/more fragile, the more valuable). Sylvan’s scholarship and Temi’s art made them a good match, since they were both highly educated, but their romantic orientations don’t seem compatible, so they make a perfect pair. 

For the longest time, before I knew sub-genres better, I used to think that  Fantasy always had swords or some kind of age-old weapons (wands belong in that category to me). It’s been fairly recently that urban fantasy and now sword-free fantasy like your book are making me acknowledge and unlearn my old perceptions. What are some challenges and advantages of writing a sword free fantasy?

One challenge, which is also an advantage, is marketing. Since swords are so ubiquitous in fantasy, having a book without them, and without much fighting generally, is going to be a firm NO from some readers. Which is fine! But it’s also going to pique some readers’ interest because it’s novel. And the term has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? So I just leaned into it, and it seems to have gotten a tiny bit of traction.

One disadvantage is, how do you structure a fantasy story without a Big Bad to be defeated? Or a Big Bad that can’t be defeated with usual means? And what happens if the skills of your protagonists are things like art, science, meditation, and outdoor skills, but no one’s a fighter? 

The answer, it turns out, is you structure the plot around discovery, both of the self and of the world, and conflicts that require the characters’ unique skillsets to solve. Each of the characters except Temi has a skill that specifically helps them. And Temi develops a skill she never suspected by what she goes through, which proves to be the saving of them all. Gilea and Leo are not useless in a fight, but none of them is going toe to toe with a big bad and winning. So the conflicts have to be something else. Which was kind of challenging, but ultimately liberating, too, and it forced me to come up with things I might never have thought of had the primary means of solving problems be based in violence or power. 

As I read the book, I always felt calm as if I myself was on a leisurely boat ride. As I compile these questions, I think the meditative magic had something to do with it! I haven’t come across any other book. What made you want to explore meditation as a means to magic? Have you seen it before (this might jog my memory of books that have had similar magic)? 

I really don’t know other books with meditation magic, though there are bound to be some, but as a yoga practitioner, I have been fascinated by the little tidbits of meditation we do in class, and it’s been part of my magic system since Finn in the Maer Cycle, though that’s a bit different (more body, less mind). I like the idea of magic that is less about power, and more about control. The mental side of magic, the exploration of the untapped power of the mind, has always fascinated me. I lean into that really hard in The Isle of a Thousand Worlds, where large chunks of the book take place in the psychic realm rather than the physical. 

What role did photography play in the journey of your book?

I developed a little photography habit during Covid, and I found myself drawn toward abstract photography, especially water and reflections. Since there’s a lot of weird watery magic, for lack of a better term, in the book, I went around to this little wetland near my house in Capitol Hill, DC and took pictures of the water, the plants, the birds, whatever caught my eye. No doubt this inspired some of my depictions of nature in the book, both because of the wetland aspect, but also the wetland is right next to the muddy Anacostia River, so I had constant visuals to feed my brain.

I noticed that the Maer were mentioned at the of The Living Waters. Is the Weirdwater Confluence duology set in the same world as your trilogy series? What are those books about?

I mentioned above that this takes place in the South of the continent of Gheil, whereas the Maer Cycle takes place in the central mountains and the north, but I wanted it to feel like another world. There are a couple little details that a reader who’s read the Maer Cycle would pick up on, but I wanted this to be a fresh entry point into my writing. Only at the end of The Living Waters does the connection become a little clearer (references to the Maer and to something called sunstone, which is called brightstone in the trilogy). We get a little more of that in Isle, and also connections to the planned Time Before trilogy, set among the Maer of old, 2,000 years before. There will be connections between all 3 series, and the whole will be called the Copper Circle. 

Back to the Maer Cycle. In a nutshell, it’s the story of the resurgence of a group of hairy humanoids called the Maer, their interactions with humans, and conflicts among the various groups of Maer. It starts out from a human perspective, but ends mostly Maer, and there’s a cyclical aspect to what we discover. There are also a lot of references to a past civilization far more advanced than the one they’re living in during the time of the trilogy, and that civilization will be the focus of the Time Before. 

Are there any lessons in publishing that you took away from the Maer Cycle that you applied to the Weirdwater Confluence?

Read-through is really tough for a new writer. Hollow Road did okay, but The Archive, which is a stronger book overall, is still relatively little known, and The Place Below even less known. I couldn’t keep doing the same thing. It had to be different, but keeping to the core qualities I strive for—close character relationships, intimate moments, and natural wonder. 

I also wanted to try something that wasn’t a trilogy, and when I started this book, I wasn’t sure if it would be a standalone or more. By the time I finished, I knew it would be a duology, which, I hoped, would be a nice change of pace, less of a commitment. I wrote two endings, one that is in the book now, and another one, with less lead-up to the second book, with a little more finality. I know some readers might have preferred that, but I just had to put the Caravan out there, since it’s so freaking cool and I really want everyone to read Isle and see what it’s all about (The Caravan is a mystical form of social media using alchemy, ancient magical tech, and meditation magic). We’ll see how my strategy works out. But that’s the gist of it. The hope is that some duology readers will go back and check put the Maer Cycle, and vice versa. But you don’t need one to read the other, nor will the next trilogy require the others. You need multiple entry points into your work, because if you write one long series and not many people read the second or third book, you’re in a tough spot. 

Lastly, do you have a favorite quote from the book that you would like to share? 

Wow, tough one! I’ll drop this bit here, from one of the mindshares in the book, which I really enjoyed writing (there are lots more in Isle too).

Gilea imagined the front of her skull as a butterfly’s wings, opening gently to soak up the sun, and she waited until she could sense Temi’s mind opening, with more of a flutter. Gilea pushed herself out like a cloud of cheroot smoke, filling the space between them, until after a moment she was drawn in thin ribbons into Temi’s mind. She let the ribbons float, limp and airy, then with a sudden gasp Temi pulled her all the way in.

Dan Fitzgerald in The Living Waters

Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Dan! 🙂 

Thank you so much for having me, and thanks for the excellent questions! 

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Thank you for hanging out with Dan and me today! We really appreciate you taking the time to read about The Living Waters and hope that if you pick it up, you will let us know! You can connect with Dan on Twitter, Instagram and his website.

The image in the banner area and graphics was taken by Dan. Many thanks to him for letting me use it.