Jay Roland (born Jason A. Roland; August 4, 1981) is an American author best known for his debut fantasy novel, Shadow of the Soul Blade, published on May 11, 2023. Born in Flint, Michigan, to Vicky Jones and David Roland, Jay spent his early years in the Beecher district of North Flint with his mother, stepfather Aron Wilson, and stepsister Gina (Regina) Wilson. Life in Flint offered both challenges and creative opportunities. The instability of moving between his parents’ households resulted in a highly mobile academic experience—four elementary schools, four junior high schools, and two high schools—which helped Jay develop a sharp observational sense and an adaptive mindset that would shape his future as both a strategist and storyteller.
At 16, following a falling out with his stepfather, Jay left home and began working at the Michigan Renaissance Festival. This marked the start of a long period of independence, during which he navigated homelessness, took on a string of jobs, and began forging the path of his adult life. He briefly relied on support from his biological father before venturing back out on his own.
Parallel to his creative pursuits, Jay built a career in information technology, starting at age 18 with the ISP mich.com in Pontiac, Michigan. He went on to rise through the ranks into corporate IT leadership, overseeing enterprise-level systems and organizational design across multiple industries. His deep background in systems thinking later led to the independent development of his Synergistic Mathematics framework—an original model that explores how complexity can amplify or cancel itself across business, technology, and even interpersonal dynamics.
The Spark of Storytelling and Tabletop Gaming
At 15, Jay was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by a friend named B.J., who invited him to a one-shot adventure set in the Greyhawk campaign using the original first edition rules. That single session was enough to spark what would become a lifelong passion for worldbuilding, storytelling, and collaborative design.
Around the same time, a classmate named Chris introduced him to Magic: The Gathering during ninth-grade science class. Through Chris, Jay met Rob, Joe, Jeremy, and Chris’s cousin Jodi—friends who quickly became his weekend crew for tabletop games and long-running campaigns. Those early sessions weren’t just pastimes—they were proving grounds for narrative structure, social dynamics, and creative improvisation.
“The game wasn’t about monsters or treasure,” Jay later reflected. “It was about crafting worlds, breathing life into characters, and making decisions that echoed far beyond a single evening of play. I fell in love with storytelling through D&D—it gave me the tools to understand character motivation, tension, pacing… and most importantly, empathy.”
The lessons stuck. And the stories never stopped.
Martial Arts and the Art of Combat Realism
Jay’s martial arts journey began at age 11 when he spotted his neighbor, Dan Parker, practicing Xiao Hong Quan, a Northern Shaolin Kung Fu form, in the backyard. Intrigued, Jay began mimicking the movements and studying forms on his own, igniting what would become a lifelong pursuit of discipline through motion.
By 16, he began training in French-Italian historical fencing under Christ Barbeau at the Michigan Renaissance Festival and briefly studied with the Ring of Steel sword performance troupe. At 20, while living in Kansas, he trained in Tenshi Takai Ryu Kenjutsu under Keith Perkins, focusing on Japanese swordsmanship. Over the years, Jay continued to study independently, training in Pai Lum Kung Fu under Sifu Reece and He Ying Zi Kung Fu under Sifu Chai Song Lin—a rare short-form family style related to White Crane and Wing Chun.
Fantasy is often filled with sword fights, brawls, and cinematic combat—but few writers bring the precision and physical truth of real fighting to the page like Jay does. That’s because for him, the choreography of battle isn’t theoretical—it’s personal.
Having studied martial arts across multiple traditions, Jay approaches fight scenes not just as action set pieces, but as opportunities to explore character, strategy, and consequence. His training shapes how his characters move—but more importantly, how they think in the heat of conflict.
“Every move in a fight has a cost,” Jay says. “Whether it’s physical stamina, emotional weight, or tactical position—real combat is never clean, and it’s never just about who swings harder.”
In his novel Shadow of the Soul Blade, combat isn’t window dressing—it’s integral to story and character. Every clash carries weight, every injury leaves a mark, and every choice under pressure reveals something deeper. The parries, feints, and split-second decisions aren’t imagined—they’re grounded in techniques Jay has practiced himself, from grappling and striking to situational awareness.
From IT to Imagination: The Professional Path
Jay left high school early and began working in IT at mich.com, an internet service provider in Pontiac, Michigan. When the dot-com bubble burst, he pivoted into a series of other industries—including construction, property maintenance, insurance, and machine fabrication—demonstrating a remarkable ability to adapt and persevere in uncertain times.
Between 2002 and 2004, Jay lived in Pittsburg, Kansas, and Springfield, Illinois, navigating a transformative period that included becoming a father. His first child, Darius Roland, was born in 2003 to his first wife, Tiffany Hooker. The marriage ended in 2004. That same year, Jay returned to Michigan and settled in Allendale near Grand Valley State University. There, he met Nyssa Barnett—his future wife—and roommates including Abby Hunter, with whom he co-developed the Iron Tempest gaming project. While never commercially released, the project aimed to create a single-source, rules-light, narrative-rich tabletop RPG system. It marked a major creative milestone and solidified Jay’s long-standing belief in the power of collaborative design.
For most, a career in IT is the epitome of structure—defined systems, logical frameworks, and predictable outcomes. But for Jay, that world of code and complexity became the unexpected foundation for something far more unpredictable: storytelling.
Before he was crafting epic sagas in the world of Ashana, Jay was designing enterprise-level IT systems and leading organizational transformations. What started as a technical support role at mich.com at age 18 became a passion for solving problems on a massive scale.
“I was drawn to systems thinking,” Jay reflects. “Understanding how different parts of an organization or technology stack interact—it’s not so different from worldbuilding in fiction.”
That connection—between systems and stories—lies at the heart of his creative evolution. While managing complex digital infrastructures, Jay began developing a conceptual model called Synergistic Mathematics. Created independently over years of personal and professional exploration, the framework maps out how relationships and dependencies within complex systems can either amplify or interfere with one another. It wasn’t long before that same mindset found a home in his writing.
Literary Emergence: The Birth of Ashana
In 2018, Jay faced a personal health scare that led him to adopt a ketogenic lifestyle. He documented the experience in a self-published book called Conquering Keto. Though the book wasn’t a commercial breakout, it introduced him to the mechanics of self-publishing—formatting, layout design, and distribution through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform. That process became the training ground for something much bigger.
Around the same time, Jay revisited a role-playing world he’d once called Darkthorne, a setting born from years of tabletop storytelling. Dusting off old maps, character sheets, and scribbled lore sparked something deeper: what if this wasn’t just a game world anymore? What if it could evolve into a full-blown narrative universe?
That spark became Ashana.
Ashana is a realm shaped by mythic landscapes, fractured memories, and the looming mysteries of the Darkthorne Forest. Jay began outlining Shadow of the Soul Blade, a novel centered around four distinct protagonists—Bastion, Xander, Reinhard, and Kumori—each with their own philosophies, loyalties, and burdens. For two years, he wrote at night while leading IT strategy by day. The completed manuscript was reviewed by twelve beta readers, edited by Nicole Zoltack, and proofread by Bell Emmanuel.
Worlds don’t arrive fully formed—they’re uncovered, layer by layer, like forgotten ruins beneath centuries of sand. For Jay, Ashana wasn’t built. It was excavated. Born from decades of inspiration, heartbreak, recovery, and creative drive, the world took shape from the inside out.
Ashana didn’t begin as a setting—it began as a feeling. The weight of memory. The push and pull between shadow and light. A place where myth meets trauma, and where pain and purpose are inseparable.
“I didn’t set out to build a world,” Jay says. “I set out to understand one. And in the process, I created Ashana.”
The seeds were planted early. Influenced by Tolkien’s epic sprawl, the emotional depth of Final Fantasy, and the unpredictable magic of tabletop campaigns, Jay had been sketching maps and lore long before writing his first novel. But it was his lived experience—survival, estrangement, discovery—that gave Ashana its soul.
Geopolitically complex and culturally layered, Ashana doesn’t rely on fantasy tropes. It reflects the messiness of real history, the nuance of identity, and the consequences of choice. Jay’s background in systems thinking allowed him to interweave magic with economy, belief systems with geography, and personal arcs with historical tension.
Everything connects. Everything has a cost.
Legacy and Looking Forward
Today, Jay Roland continues to lead dual lives—one in the realm of enterprise IT leadership, and the other deep in the heart of Ashana. His debut novel, Shadow of the Soul Blade, marked the first step in an expanding fantasy series, with sequels and companion stories already in motion. But fantasy isn’t his only domain. Jay is also the creator of The Stillwater Mysteries, a grounded and atmospheric collection of psychological thrillers set in a fictional Midwest town steeped in secrets, trauma, and a lingering sense of the uncanny. Where Ashana explores myth and memory, Stillwater drills into the fractures of everyday life and the quiet horrors that hide in plain sight.
At the same time, Jay continues to develop and refine his Synergistic Mathematics framework—an original theory that examines how systems, choices, and structures either amplify or interfere with one another, across fields as varied as leadership, design, narrative, and personal growth.
As a father of five, husband, mentor, strategist, swordsman, and storyteller, Jay lives by the belief that structure and story are never opposites—they’re allies. Whether he’s building global IT systems or narrative empires, his work is a testament to integration over compartmentalization, and to intentional design over accidental success.
“I didn’t find my place in the world,” Jay says. “I built it.”
And he’s just getting started.
