Where is Barking at Dogs right now?
Every so often someone asks me how the book is coming along, usually in the careful voice you save for a friend who has been talking about the same project for a suspiciously long time. Fair enough. So here is an honest update on where Barking at Dogs actually stands, now that it has stopped being a heap of stories on my laptop and started becoming a real thing with a cover and a spine.
The short version is that we are on track for 30 September 2026. That date is booked, it is real, and I am no longer allowed to move it, largely because my publisher (Leora) keeps a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet has opinions.
The writing itself is finished. Fourteen profane stories, an introduction that took me longer to write than some of the stories it introduces, and a glossary for anyone who has never had to explain what a bakkie is. These are true-ish tales about growing up on the edge of white suburbia in late-apartheid South Africa, a country that was absurd and a little insane in ways you really had to be there to believe.
What is happening now is the part nobody warns you about. Once the writing is done, a book does not simply appear. It goes into production, which is a polite word for months of small decisions. The cover is done and I am genuinely happy with it. The interior has been typeset, which means the words finally look like a book instead of a manuscript, and I have been reading proofs, hunting for the one stray comma that always survives. I expect I will flip to a random page and find the word custard spelled with a silent Q the day after publication. The ISBN is registered (979-8-89412-654-8 if you are the sort of person who collects these), and the paperback will be printed and distributed worldwide through IngramSpark, which reaches the UK and South Africa as well as here in the States. That last part matters to me more than I expected, since a fair number of the people in these stories are still scattered across those places.
The next real milestone is the ebook. The EPUB should be ready in early August, and once that file exists a lot of other things can finally start moving, from advance copies to the online listings. Until then I am in the odd position of having a finished book that is not quite done yet, like watching a cake through the oven door.
Right after that, advance reading copies go out to early readers, reviewers, and a handful of booksellers and librarians who have been kind enough to say yes. If you have ever wondered what the inside of a small independent book launch looks like, it turns out to be a lot of packaging, a lot of gratitude, and Leora quietly running the whole logistics operation while I take the credit.
As for what is actually in the book, I will only say this much for now. There are ghosts, or at least one very persuasive night in a haunted annexe in the Karoo. There is a story about escaping military service by the thinnest possible margin. And there is one particular tale, involving a marketing business born on the run from the military police, that later ended up being tested on MythBusters, which is a sentence I never imagined typing about my own life.
So that is where we are. The book is written, the cover is set, the presses are lining up, and the calendar has stopped being negotiable. Mark 30 September 2026. It lands just after Heritage Day, which feels about right for a book this South African.
If you would like a nudge when it is available, or when advance copies open up, the best thing to do is drop me a note through the contact page on leonlazarus.com. I would love to keep you posted, and I promise the updates will be more entertaining than most spreadsheets.