Dane Erbach

AAA! I can’t wait to hear what you think of MEAT BEES!

The Author 🐝 The First Page 🐝 The Cover

Okay. I’m officially querying another book.

It’s exciting and nerve-wracking pitching a new book with two others in the trad pipeline. Will they help just get in the way?

Small publishers / agents, let me know if you want to read a horror novel with humor and heart and time travel and gore.

Huh. Somehow, MEAT BEES ended up on Goodreads’ Month-by-Month Peek at 2026’s Most Anticipated Horror list.

Excited is an understatement. Surreal might be more accurate. Even cooler, I’m on there with my fellow CLASH authors and some of my favorite authors of all time.

Crawling off the couch to share that MEAT BEES has hit 100 ratings on Goodreads.

Didn't expect to get 100 ratings in the lifetime of this book, let alone this far from its publication date.

If you've read and reviewed, even if MEAT BEES wasn't your cup of tea, thank you.

Dang, writing the climax of a novel is so exciting and stressful and fun and excruciating.

Noticed this morning that MEAT BEES has over 100 reviews on NetGally, and over 50 ratings at Goodreads. Considering that the book won't be published until August, I'd say that's kind of awesome.

It brings me so much joy just knowing that people are reading my book.

It’s been a wild ride watching people enjoy MEAT BEES—and the book still has eight months until it’s released!

Thanks for the boost, Capes and Tights!

My Newspaper Class: Squealing about boys, crying about grades, swiping through memes, breaking into spontaneous song, maybe writing or posting stories, but probably just eating Munchkins.

Me: This class is a hot mess.

Student: It's just because this class is a safe space for us.

Me: 😕🥹😭

Gotta admit: MEAT BEE's cover is gnarly in the best possible way. Props to cover artist Joel Amat Güell and the fine folks at CLASH Books for giving my book the cover it deserves.

I hope the story moves readers as much as the cover does.

I love Halloween, and I love dressing up ridiculously at school. I was expecting everyone to know who I was today but, so far, it’s just been a lot of “Who are you supposed to be?”

When I tell them my daughter is a KPop Demon Hunter, some of them figure it out.

Review: Meat Bees by Dane Erbach | FanFiAddict Synopsis: By the time Scarlett Sutton arrives at her dad’s cabin in the Smoky Mountains, two locals have already been eaten alive by wasps. Of course, she d ...

As utterly, gloriously bonkers as its cover and title all but screams, @browntrowsers.bsky.social ‘s “Meat Bees,” is a Jaws-Candyman hybrid that stuns with visceral imagery, before planting its mandibles somewhere tender.
@clashbooks.bsky.social AUG ‘26

fanfiaddict.com/review-meat-...

AAAA! Thank you so much! This means everything to me!

And, just like that, I’m 2/3 of the way through my current novel. I’m on track to be done by the end of 2025.

If you like creepy hotels and time traveling and spiders with knifes for legs, this Bud’s for you.

Proud to say that my dad was one of the inflatable tyrannosauruses at our local No Kings rally.

My first grader Maeby has been writing "Maeby 2000" on the name line of all her worksheets — totally unprompted, by the way — and I never expected when I became a parent that my children would be so incredibly cool.

WHAT?! MEAT BEES is the most requested horror novel on NetGalley right now?! Who knows how long it'll be there, this is an AWESOME milestone, and I'm very proud.

Are you one of the readers who requested it? I hope you love it. Please let me know your thoughts, and thank you for reading!

Listen: I don't even know if anything I do at my job makes any sense to anyone any more, but I made this meme this morning to remind my Book Club kids of when our next meeting is, and it made me happy.

*nervous laughter* Uh, MEAT BEES is currently in the top five most requested horror novels right now on NetGalley with some other rad looking books.

I suppose that means you should request the ARC now while you can.

I wrote my spooky story "Can V. Should" when I was in grad school more than a decade ago. I feel old, but I also feel fortunate that Little Red Bird Publishing wanted it for volume two of their DARK SPECULATIONS anthology.

www.amazon.com/Dark-Specula...

My short story "Myrna" reappears in Emby Press's anthology THE GHOST PAPERS: ARMS IN THE DARK with a slightly tweaked ending alongside Algernon Blackwood, Edith Wharton and Bram Stoker. Not sure how that happened, but I'm thrilled.

www.amazon.com/dp/B0FTV4LTT...

I wrote my 300-word micro-story "Another Miracle" specifically for Middle West Press's CRYPTIDS, KAIJU & CORN: POEMS AND MICRO-STORIES ABOUT MODERN MIDWEST MONSTERS. How could I not submit to this awesome-sounding anthology?

www.amazon.com/Cryptids-Kai...

Woke up this morning and realized that I have three stories coming out in three different spooky anthologies this month! Like monsters in any good scary story, I suppose they snuck up on me.

The stories include a micro-story, a reprint (with an updated ending), and a story I wrote a long time ago.

MEAT BEES has a cover!!! AAAA!!!

😭🤮🫠🫣🥳

Being a writer is hoping that not hearing back from a magazine that normally rejects your short stories pretty quickly is a good thing.

As for today's edition of "An Author's Google History..."

• snowblower engine
• 1986 children's clothing
• popples
• what's a spider's elbow called?

RE: The biomechanial spider in my current work-in-progress.

My subconscious mind has drawn inspiration from these two characters, unrelated except for how important they are to me.

How they combine to make a deadly monster that slices up characters and digs wormholes through time, *shrug emoji*

I, uh, just wrote a pretty gory, violent part of my WIP during my lunch break where a charcter gets carved up by a biomechanical spider.

I don’t exactly know how to transition from this to teaching my students how to interview a source effectively.

Being a writer/teacher is weird.

I feel like I can go months without hearing about any of my short story submissions.

Then I'll get literally a half dozen rejections in the span of a couple days—and a few more rejections the day after that.

The universe wants to break us writers, I tells ya.

I thought about how maybe it should be someone else's responsibility—lawmakers, for example.

I dunno, maybe it was just a bad week (month, year, century) to do a lockdown drill. Maybe I'm just tired.