Growing a fantasy universe
A refresh on the ARC Worlds '25 publishing slate
This newsletter has unfortunately taken a back seat this year, as I worked on Blood of Atlantis issue 2, Guild of Magic: The Gauntlet, and my various other projects.
But I’m hoping to change that, one email at a time!
In this week’s edition, I’ll be giving you a tour around the ARC Worlds universe and its various constituent galaxies. Onward!
Secret Sauce
My newest project is a bit different from my existing urban fantasy - it’s a cozy fantasy about an elf who runs a sandwich shoppe. I present Secret Sauce!
I met artist Megan Huang at a creator breakfast at New York Comic Con last year, and it was so great to collaborate with her on this story!
Here is page 1 of our 6-page short:
You can read Secret Sauce along with four other great stories, in issue 4 of The CloakRoom from
, now live on Kickstarter!Blood of Atlantis
As you may have seen, we just wrapped the Kickstarter campaign for issue 2 of Blood of Atlantis last month. I’m currently putting the finishing touches on the back matter and some of the swag, and soon my apartment will be filled with piles of comics ready to ship out to our awesome backers!
After that, Fran is scheduled to start on issue 3 next month. That means I need to finish the script over the next few weeks. This issue is where things start to kick into high gear, as we head towards the end game of this first arc. Expect a new exotic location and more secret NYC shenanigans!
If you missed the Kickstarter campaign, don’t worry, as you can still pre-order the issue through our BackerKit pre-order store and get your copy before the retail release.
In the meantime, enjoy one of my favorite pages from issue 2, this Atlantis splash that Fran knocked out of the park:
And in case you missed it, I was featured in the latest “print” edition of Ink to Table and on the latest episode of the Ink to Table podcast. I talked all about Kickstarter, moving from prose to comics, and much more!
NYC Questing Guild
It’s been two years since the release of Guild of Magic, which seems crazy to me. But lest you think I have been letting the prose corner of the urban fantasy ARC Worlds universe languish1, I am happy to tell you that you are mistaken. In fact, the next entry in the NYC Questing Guild series, Guild of Magic: The Gauntlet, is referenced in issue 2 of Blood of Atlantis!
Oh and also I have written over 50,000 words of The Gauntlet, which I am aiming to wrap over the summer. It’s basically The Triwizard Tournament from Harry Potter only if it were a battle royale taking place in New York City! It’s got a host of new POV characters that you are really going to enjoy. Plus podcast transcript chapters! We’re going full new media here.
In other Guild news, I have been recording Guild of Magic chapters as an author-read audiobook and posting them on my YouTube channel. You can listen to the first 26 chapters (as well as all of book 1) for free. I’ll be resuming recording the second half of the book next week, so by the end of the year, the whole thing will be done and I will be a professional voice-over actor and hopefully get admitted to SAG-AFTRA. I won’t turn away WGA membership though.
We’ll be launching Guild of Magic: The Gauntlet this fall on Kickstarter and I already have the cover in hand. But only I have seen it. You’ll have to wait until mid-summer before it is revealed, sorry!
After I wrap Gauntlet, I will return to Guild of Relics, of which I already have seven chapters written and a book cover! I’m hoping for a spring 2026 Kickstarter for that book, after which I will be able to tell people that I have written a trilogy, just like J.R.R. Tolkien.
Demon Sword
My genius plan to write Gauntlet chapters in the morning and Demon Sword chapters in the evening worked like a charm for about three weeks. Anyway, I have posted the first five chapters of the Demon Sword novel, which follows the Demon Sword novella, on Royal Road for your reading pleasure. I expect that I will experiment with alternating writing Relics and Demon Sword in one-week blocks after Gauntlet is done, to see if I can push both rocks up the proverbial writing mountain.
Speaking of that novella, I am working on something … related to that story that I can’t tell you about yet. So in future newsletters I will refer to it as Project Lovestruck, and you will all be on the inside and know what I’m talking about. But keep it to yourself!
Adventures in cooking
Finally, since our last proper newsletter, I made some interesting dishes and took pictures of them. So now you can see them! We have homemade sushi, air-fried chicken fingers and fries, and spicy tuna crispy rice!
What’s next?
I don’t know! But I will be back next Friday with another edition of this newsletter to keep the streak going. If you have a suggestion as to what you would like me to write about, or a burning question about any of my books or comics, I’d love to hear from you.
I need a better name for the shared Blood of Atlantis/NYC Questing Guild universe!