Writing Progress Log : W/E 17th July 2026

This is the first, of hopefully many, logs documenting our progress on our books. Currently, we are writing two books at the same time. The first is The Bookshop Mysteries Book 7 - A Ring of Roses. The second book is the start of a new series, and it’s a series that we can’t announce just yet as we have signed it to a larger big-five publisher, who we can’t name just yet, so that book will be referred to as MMS-Book-1.

Bookshop Mysteries Book 7 - A Ring of Roses

This week we wrote four chapters for this book, chapters 6 to 9, which was a total of 4,257 words. We are still at the beginning of this story and getting a feel for the murders that are being committed, but we are pretty confident in our direction. Amanda has edited the first five chapters and is happy with the story’s progress so far.

MMS-Book-1

MMS Book 1 is getting quite close to its first draft deadline with the publisher, so we have pushed up the priority of this project. This week we wrote six chapters for his book, chapters 35 - 40, totalling 6,233 words. For a little background, we first had this idea for MMS when writing Bookshop Mysteries Book 2, A Murder at the Church, but we didn’t want to start it too soon as we were establishing Bookshop Mysteries. We began drafting in August 2025, but not as a priority; we were just noodling around with the idea at that point; that was until we began talking with a publisher in February of 2026 who were very keen on MMS, so we started putting more time into the project.

We actually only signed the publishing contract this week, and we have the first delivery meeting next week, so I’ll find out if I’m allowed to announce anything yet. Stay tuned as we are very excited about this new series.

So set your mind at ease though, we are still going to be writing Bookshop Mysteries novels. We have no intention of stopping that series as we love writing the characters so much.