A week and a day to publication!

Eight more days, and the Road to Murder will be out there… It’s an exciting time – full of last-minute dds and ends together with the people at Sapere Books – and also a slightly terrifying one…

No, really. All the doubts, the questions, the what-ifs… What if nobody likes it? What if I’ve left it riddled with glaring howlers? What if readers hate it? What if a passing helicopter drops a grand piano right as I step out of the house, and…

Yes well, not quite that last one, perhaps – but you get my drift.

And it’s not even as though it were all new to me. I’ve had publication days before. Three times, in Italy – five and a half, actually, if you count my forays into self-publishing – plus a dozen of opening nights, because debuting a play isn’t all that different. So you’d think I should at least know how to handle it, by now.

You’d think so, yes – but the one thing I seem to have learned is that, no matter how many times it happens, it doesn’t change all that much. Or perhaps it takes more of it to blunt the edges? I’ll let you know in a few years, if all goes well.

Meanwhile, it still is exciting and frightening in equal measure.

It’s a good thing, I suppose, that I don’t have the time to stare at the 20th of May as it looms closer and closer… There is the school play debuting in a couple of weeks, and the 24th Century tech props it needs, and Book Two to hand in by the end of the month, and the rehearsals for Nina’s play in between… When a friend’s twelve-year-old son asked the other day whether I’m ever bored, I just had to laugh.

So… eight days to go. Eight days of doubts, and odds and ends, and butterflies-filled stomach, and Goodreads, and…

And wish me luck. And, if you like, you can still preorder The Road to Murder here. And do tell: how do you deal with publication days (or opening nights)?