Dane Mallahan

I guess this is my first update! But an update to what? What is the point of this site? And who am I? I encourage those that read this and come to my site to look around to see what I am building, but I suppose I should answer those few questions right away.

Who am I?

My name is Dane Mallahan and like many of those that find themselves writing, it took me a long time to get here. I have always developed stories in my head – mostly science fiction and fantasy – and held creative imagery there, but for whatever reason’s was never able to wrangle it together and put it down on paper. Until the Covid-19 pandemic hit and I found myself with an incredible amount of time on my hands. Since then I have been working on several projects, having written one stand alone book and now the series I am working on, The Path of The Chosen. I’ll get to those at the end.

My style mostly hits what I used to refer to as ’emerging sci-fi’ but I now know to be actually defined as ‘near future’. Though I do not always stick to that genre, I love to tell stories about worlds that are developing their technology and aren’t quite fully immersed into the society. Though I do have plans for a more future tech related series, but that encompasses other genres relating to mythology as well. I don’t like to fit into one box.

What is the point of this site?

As a new writer, working on establishing myself, I thought it would be important to have a landing site for everything I am working on. This includes full length novels, short stories, and hopefully other forms of storytelling art along the way. As I write and develop my stories I will be posting once a week – probably on Fridays – about what I have accomplished that week. This is not only to hold me accountable, but to try and build viewership and community around the books that I am writing and plan on writing.

The heart of who I am as a writer has come from me developing different tales in my head. Be it from a dream or a daydream, a wondering thought, or asking the question, ‘What if?’. As I come up with some of these strange, odd, or curious tales, I will upload them to this site for anyone and everyone to read.

Now for the – what I think is – main question: But an update to what?

The series that I am working on, The Path of The Chosen. I am still working on writing and uploading a short synopsis of The Chosen series, but the main points are these: Held within a mountaintop valley there live a community of woodland creatures. These animals have developed sentience, the cognitive ability to speak and reason, and have developed their own society. At the peak of this society are the Elders, animals that have been chosen to lead and make decisions in the Valley. The main character, a young rabbit named Lucas Thistlefur, has recently lost his father due to a tragic accident. But the accident did not feel right to Lucas, and now he is out to find more answers. Along the way he will find that the Valley and the Elders are not what they seem.

This first book of the series, The Secrets of the Valley (working title), is mostly complete, I have run through a few editing rounds, and will likely need one or two more to feel comfortable publishing. The only thing I am lacking right now is cover art, and I am in the process of looking for an artist to finalize that. I have also moved on to the second book in the series, The Valley Unknown (also working title), and that is in the first or second draft phase. I wanted to have plenty of material to fall back on before I started to publish, which may be a mistake, or it may not be, I will never really know.

Now for what will be the bulk of most of my update posts moving forward; what did I accomplish this week? I am doing a re-read for editing/content revisions on book two, which I had planned on finishing this week, but I had a compulsion to make this site which wouldn’t go away, so building this site has taken up the most of my time this week. Next week I hope to – mostly – finish this site and the revisions/draft two of book two, and then move back to finalizing the manuscript of book one. As of now I don’t have a publication date or time frame for book one, but I am shooting for before December this year.

That was long. Long and not as developed or concrete as I would like it to be, but that’s what I do some times! Thank you for reading and I hope that you will keep coming back to check in on things and take a look at what’s to come!

Cheers,

Dane