10 days to 34 Days

Now I feel sick. Bloodhound Books have sent out the ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) to their test readers for review and these lovely people are the only ones to have read it apart from me, Betsy, my publisher, and my editor, Heather.

So now you know why I feel sick. This is such a scary few days until I start to see bits of feedback. What if nobody enjoys it? I enjoyed writing it, but that doesn't mean anything really, because my mind is slightly out of kilter. It's part of the genetic make up of a writer. It certainly doesn't mean anyone will enjoy reading it.

When my proof copy came through it forced me to read it as a real book. That was an eye-opener because prior to this it had only been a Word document and looked nothing like a book. Now it's a book with orange highlighters through it where I picked up on formatting issues and a couple of missing words, a strokeable book, mine all mine.

Let me tell you why 34 Days is so special and so scary for me. When I wrote Beautiful it was over 20 years ago. I retyped it and it was published in September, 2015, exactly one year ago. I knew nothing. I handed my precious baby over to a publisher who knew just as much about me as I did about them, and yet they took a chance on a 69 year old author. Beautiful did well, really well, and in the three months between publication and Christmas I was working on 34 Days, which had a working title of Escape.

I had completed 35,000 words when I shelved it temporarily, because people, readers, kept asking for a sequel to Beautiful. And so Angel came into being; a link at the end of the Kindle version of Beautiful ensured a pretty hefty readership and that's just what happened.

So my first two books passed by in a blur. Almost accidentally really. But then I took up the reins of 34 Days again, its working title abandoned as I worked out the number of days it took to devastate lives. Thirty four.

And now it is about to be let loose in ten days time, on 3 October. It is a story of murder, necessary murder, and how lives are affected by necessary murder.

I feel sick...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/34-Days-gripping-psychological-thriller-ebook/dp/B01IP6YE0M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474539173&sr=8-1&keywords=anita+waller