So Much News…

Wow, where on earth has the past half a year gone? I’ve thinking for a while “It’s been a couple of months since I updated my blog” but in fact it was July last year I last posted! Where have I been?

So, how about I just bullet point what’s been going on in the world of Dan Rabarts, dark fiction author, then?

• Lee Murray and I finished writing Teeth of the Wolf, Book 2 in the Path of Ra series, and have run that through a bevy of beta readers and fired it off to the publisher, who is suitably impressed and excited. That’s a relief;
• Hounds of the Underworld made it as far as the long list of the Bram Stoker Award nominations for Superior Achievement in a Novel, which was thrilling, and even though it didn’t squeeze onto the shortlist I still get little chills to think we were there on a list of excellent books which included Stephen King himself, if only for a little while;
• Hounds has also made it onto the shortlist of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards for Best Novel, so fingers crossed on that front too;
• In less than a week, I’ll be boarding a plane and making the long haul to Providence, Rhode Island, USA, for StokerCon, the annual convention of the Horror Writers Association. It’s going to be a blast. I’m going to be on a bunch of panels, doing a reading from Hounds with Lee Murray, and looking forward to making a whole lot of new connections. Nervous but super excited;

• The trip to Providence is being kindly propped up by the International Promotional Fund for Literature, a grant adminstered by Creative New Zealand and the Publishers Association of New Zealand. Big thanks to CNZ and PANZ for supporting my venture into promoting both my own work and New Zealand dark fiction into the American market;
• My Shadows Awards trophy for Tipuna Tapu arrived, thanks to the Australasian Horror Writers Association, and has spent the last month or so at my desk at work freaking out my colleagues, before coming home last night for a very special photoshoot, and it’s first time meeting its brother;

• I’ve done a bunch of guest blog posts and interviews over the past few months, and I’ll do another post to collect links to all of those together after this one;

So what’s next? Survive StokerCon. In fact, survive travelling through the strange dystopic landscape of the USA. Survive without the family for a week. Plot out the third Path of Ra book. Finish edits on a different novel and get it into the right hands, in the hopes it might find a home. Survive the day job. Keep hurling those ropes at the sun. Cos that’s how we roll.