The Mystery of My Newsletter

Version 26.06.2025

Jun 26, 2025

Hello and welcome to the first issue of my new newsletter, “The Mystery of...”

I am Dave Sokolowski: Mystery Writer, Coffee Drinker, and Recovering Class Clown.

I guess it’s time to finally start this thing, right?

The path to get here, in front of you like this, has been long and perilous, but always one day at a time and with an understanding that we’re all human and therefore both creative and fallible. It’s really, really hard to carve out a space to be both of these in a real and honest way these days, but you should know most importantly that everything written here is 100% mine and that aside from spelling and the occasional punctuation, I never use any assistance in my writing. No AI here.

So that’s my promise to you, first and foremost.

Right then, about this newsletter…

What’s All This About Then?

Each “Mystery of” newsletter will have three parts (until I change it!) and look something like this:

The mystery of my writing career – what I am currently writing and creating.
A new mystery – something I’ve been recently banging my head against that I want to share with you.
The mystery of you – well, probably not you specifically (but who knows, it would be awesome to write about you), but rather just talking about other creators and sharing inspiration – it’s a tough world out there for artists and creators (for most people, really), but much of my interest lies in meeting cool people and finding out what they do, how they do it, etc, and this is my place to share that.

I may introduce more sections, subsections, headers, and substrata later, but for now we’ll just stick with these. I aim to publish these newsletters every two weeks for at least the rest of the year, and will probably keep writing other bi-weekly essays as well. So if you’ve subscribed to me, you can expect something weekly for the foreseeable future.

Let’s get started.

(This first newsletter is, as it turns out, a little long - so let me know if you read the whole thing, or if you don’t and it’s just too long - I like them being shorter but sometimes I need to explain the whole thing.)

The Mystery of My Writing Career

Or, What is this newsletter thing?

There is so much context to share with you, all at once, that I need to remember that we’re in this for the long haul and that, just like a good mystery, it’s better for me to spool out little chunks of my qualifications as a mystery writer as we go. But we need to start somewhere.

So who am I and why am I writing a newsletter called The Mystery? What are my bona fides? Where’s the juice, man – where’s the juice?!?!?

Most recently, I have been a co-host of the Miskatonic University Podcast for the past 5+ years, where I have crafted a show that helps our listeners design, run, and play weird and horrific role-playing games. We most usually focus on games such as Call of Cthulhu, Alien, Mothership, Vampire, Ultraviolet Grasslands, and Cthulhu Dark, but there are so many, many more (really too many to name).

And looking back on my 130+ episodes as co-host, I can see that I am really trying to understand how to improve my skills of writing and running quality mystery games (which is different than but related to writing quality mystery stories). That’s really it – through all the creator interviews (with some fantastic industry luminaries) and curriculum discussions (especially over the last year), I’ve realized that much of my interest lies in trying to figure out what makes mysteries tick, both at a game table but also in fiction, movies, etc.

I’ve also written and self-published two TTRPGs that are Cthulhu Mythos-driven and center around a core mystery:

Sun Spots starts with a daughter who has refused to leave a strange artist community up in the mountains, and

He Who Laughs Last is a murder mystery set in contemporary Los Angeles,

both of which were successfully Kickstarted by many amazing backers. When I try to understand what stories I like to explore via games, I notice that those scenarios (and most of my other games) don’t have monsters and are very human-focused. I am working on two games currently (more on those later) and scary monsters and gods take a backseat to the scariest monster of all… us! (Cue swish of cold wind and banging shutters.)

I love monster and alien stories (John Carpenter’s The Thing is an all time favorite), but I’m far more interested in what our choices say about us as a civilization, culture, and a species. (Our reaction to the alien is what makes The Thing so good.)

~Many unpublished works, not as organized~

In addition to my game books and podcast episodes, I have a large stack of unpublished novels and screenplays that will probably never see the light of day. And that’s fine. I wrote most of them 20+ years ago and I was never able to revise them to a place others would want to read them.

But I went back and reviewed these last winter and I discovered something interesting: they are all tonally similar to the two (now three with more new ideas every day, sigh) novels that I have lined up ready to write, and can be generally categorized as:

Absurd murder mysteries
Existential thrillers

Do those types of stories sound interesting? If so, then please stick around, because those are really interesting to me too, and I pretty much have the rest of my life planned out writing those kinds of stories.

Now, if you are asking “what exactly are existential thrillers?” well, I have some good news – this newsletter is going to answer that question, as well as many other questions that feed into me figuring out how to:

develop, write, and publish mystery novels, and

build a lifestyle that allows me to quit my IT consulting job and do this full-time before I turn 60.

That’s the stated goal and I’m going to be here talking about that for as long as I can be. So if any of that is interesting, please keep reading.

The Mystery of Newsletters

Wayyyyyyyyy back in the halcyon days of the late ‘90s (when a gallon of gas was literally 99 cents), I started what we would now call an online newsletter. Every week for a couple months, I would write out a question or a struggle that I was banging my head against and write a few hundred words on what that question meant to me, how we try and grow up and learn around these challenges, and other similar themes, and then email that to a handful of friends and co-workers.

I have no idea what I was doing then, aside from knowing that I really liked writing and that sharing it journal-style was an early attempt to post thoughts to my friends before any social media. None of these newsletters exist anymore, so I’ll just keep the memory intact that I was trying to communicate in a way that we had not yet figured out but that is now totally standard.

Do you subscribe to other newsletters? I love a good newsletter but then I get overexcited and suddenly my inbox is filled with so many newsletters that I can’t keep up, and then I have to go through and unsubscribe, which makes me feel bad. It’s a weird cycle.

The goal here is to find the most direct way to communicate with people interested in either

reading my thoughts on a particular topic, and/or
learning about my progress on my writing projects and the creative processes that get me into my chair every day.

Newsletters are cool because they are not tied to any social media platform algorithm, and that I own my list of emails of amazing people, so that if suddenly Substack just disappears, there are plenty of other ways to write to you. So that’s the form and function of newsletters and why I’m here generally.

But what is this newsletter specifically? Why are we here?

Two things in my life that have led me here:

1. I am writing every day, and that allows me to not only complete two TTRPG projects in the next year (an Alien RPG scenario that is the best thing I’ve ever written, and a modern horror setting focused in Washington DC), but also begin writing mystery novels as my creative focus; and,

2. I am building a creative lifestyle that focuses on art and balance, and I want to discuss how this comes together and what challenges and successes I uncover in this new life.

And for all this, I need a focus – a North Star – to guide these communications and missives through the chaos of my life and yours. I need a wrapper to collect and hold my thoughts together, something to bind our expectations so we can build some consistency in our lives.

It may not be The North Star but it can be My North Star

Welcome to “The Mystery of… Dave Sokolowski”, a newsletter (and eventually a YouTube channel) where I

uncover,

discuss, and

attempt to solve a challenge that I’m facing in my creative journey,

and provide a sense of direction for how to tackle said challenge.

It would be really easy to stay on my current path, to let this crazy, modern world distract me sufficiently and let my dreams die a slow death like so many others. But I just can’t. I have to keep trying to get these books in my head onto paper, and this newsletter is part of that journey.

I am just beginning here, just stepping out on a new journey and I’m absolutely terrified of failure, of distraction, of losing the will to fight against the forces of entropy that seem to drag against every day. Seriously, everything is breaking down around me and it just drains the will, day after day after week after month after forever.

But I’ve had this idea for a book in my brain since the late ‘90s – since that moment I mentioned earlier when I was writing email newsletters to a dozen people – and it’s this crazy existential thriller that counters fast-paced action sequences with mind-wracking questions about personal identity in a vast, uncaring universe, and I think it could be a really, really great read. I want you to read it.

First, though, I need to write it, and before I write that one, I have to write a first one. And before I write the first one I need to finish up some other projects. So I hope you can see me now when I’m trying to untangle my focus and efforts against this absolute batshit crazy world we live in and figure out how to make a living as a creative and give the world more than I take.

So that’s what this newsletter is about.

The Mystery of You

Thank for making it this far; I will try to not be so wordy in the future but let me know if you like me this wordy – I’m glad to give the people what they want, you just have to tell me.

This section of the newsletter is my opportunity to share and inspire with the community at large, and I will try to focus on other like-minded artists who are out there making similar efforts to build creative spaces.

For today, I’m going to share my new favorite ambient musician Caught in Joy (YT channel here, Bandcamp channel here), who I now listen to almost every day when I’m writing. Finding the right amount of instrumental rhythm and melody for my daily writing always seems a chore, and when I’ve found someone I like I usually commit wholly. CiJ is just that. If you listen to ambient, synthy, soundscapey stuff at all, I highly recommend.

(Also, I’m going to make a whole shift from Spotify to Bandcamp over the next year, but that will take me a while, so the posts I share will either be YT, which is okay for artists, or Bandcamp, which really does a great job of supporting artists and I need to really do more of that in my life. I am a reluctant prisoner to Spotify, for now.)

That’s it – that’s my first newsletter and you’re still here with me! Thank you! This was just the overview of the menu. There is more creativity and madness coming. I hope you’ll join me on that journey.

Drop me a message and let me know if you like your newsletters short or long…

Dave Sokolowski