Newsletter - May 2026

What's Dan Writing?
As usual, I am writing secret things for Dragonsteel that I'm mostly not allowed to tell you about. What I CAN tell you, though, is that after three and half years at the company I have FINALLY cleared enough off my plate to start in earnest on my first big Cosmere series. In the past, I've been doing collab novels with Brandon, short stories for events, scripts for videos, and huge projects like Storydeck--and, to be clear, I'm still doing a lot of those kinds of projects--but now I also have time to sit down and really dig into the big series. It's one I've been noodling on in the background ever since I joined the Cosmere, and I'm unbelievably excited for it. And, as always, I can't tell you what it's about or even what it's like. But it's awesome!
What's Dan Reading?
Right now I have the privilege to read Spider Island by T.C. Duck. T.C. is a former student of mine, and I got to read a sample of this book at a Writing Excuses event a few years ago, and I loved it and I'm so excited that the full novel is now available. The story is set on a fantasy world that has advanced to a point of modern technology, and follows two main characters: a young man from a magical village who gets to compete on a survival reality show, and a former producer of that show who has been called back to investigate the mysterious death of a crew member. The worldbuilding is fantastic, the story is compelling, and the premise is like nothing you've ever read before. It will be released this summer. Preorder now on Kindle or in hardback.

What Does Dan Recommend?

I have so many things I want to recommend to you, but this month let's narrow it down to an RPG publisher called The Gauntlet, and their ruleset Carved from Brindlewood. This is a family of roleplaying games that all focus on solving mysteries but with a funky twist: none of the mysteries has a canon, pre-written ending, and instead the players build it all themselves during play. I know this sounds weird, and honestly it took me a few months to get my head around the idea and decide to try one of the games. Once I actually played a session, though, I fell in love instantly. These games help you tell fun, exciting, satisfying mystery stories in such a way that the GM always feels like they know what to do next, and the players never feel frustrated or lost. The two games I most strongly recommend are Brindlewood Bay, which is basically "Murder, She Wrote" with a slowly-unfolding backdrop of increasingly Lovecraftian horror, and Public Access, which uses modern trends of 80s nostalgia and analog horror (ie, creepy videotapes, liminal spaces, and broken reality) to turn a small town into a cosmic nightmare. They're easy to learn, incredibly easy to play, and work perfectly for both one-shots and campaigns.