Writing Progress Log : W/E 21st August 2026

This week we wrote one of our favourite chapters in the Bookshop Mysteries series, and that’s the Murder Mystery Reading Club debate. We never intended for this to become a series regular. In book 1, the first club event was intended as a mechanism for Gemma to drum up new business for the Bookworm, but readers loved it and it became a regular event in the books. These debates are fun to write and they require a huge amount of research to plan the debate, and this was no different. The initial draft ran at around 5,500 words, which was too long, so we needed to do a lot of work to whittle it down to a more sensible length of 2,700 words. The debate is chapter 17, and then we wrote chapter 18, which is a chapter that leads us into the next part of the story. In total, we wrote 2 chapters and 3,800 words, which is quite good considering the amount of research needed for the debate chapter.

We also took Wednesday off this week for a day trip for my son, who is into military history. We drove to the Hack Green Nuclear Bunker, which is a decommissioned government bunker here in the UK, and is now a museum.

Missile warning system from the Hack Green Nuclear Bunker museum in the UK

I (Steve) spent Friday setting up our new merchandise store. We used to use Spreadshirt, but I had a reader report that they don’t ship to the US. They used to, so something had changed. After a support call, it turns out to ship to the US we need to set up a new store and rebuild all the products. Well, I wasn’t going to do that as having two stores with the same company is not great. Instead, we have picked a new company called FourthWall. The new store can be found here: https://adventures-in-writing-merch-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp

The old store is still available as we have a lot of books out there with the old store details printed, so we have left it in place, but I spent a good part of Friday and Saturday updating all the books and re-uploading them to Amazon and some of our print partners. A grotty job, but it needed to be done.