The first part of this week was spent working on MMS Book 2. We rewrote the majority of chapter 16, as we had a better idea for it. We then added another chapter in the middle of Act 1, which is an action sequence that cuts away from the main characters. It’s something we had an idea for the other week. We then wrote chapter 17 which got us to the end of Act 1. In total, we drafted 4758 words for MMS Book 2. We then did a little restructuring. Not too much; we wanted to split a few chapters as they felt a little long, and there were some perfect places for a few page-turn cliffhangers. We are going to leave MMS Book 2 for a couple of weeks while we complete The Bookshop Mysteries Book 7.
For The Bookshop Mysteries Book 7, we drafted chapter 37 at 1593 words. Not a huge amount, but we spent some time thinking through the finale, so we think we have what we need. Amanda has been very busy in her day job the past few weeks so she had a large batch of chapters built up to edit. She has gone through those now and I’ve applied all her changes into the master document, which took a while, but it’s a very important part of our process.
In total we drafted 6351 new words across both books.
We also announced this week the new publisher that we are working with. That publisher is Simon & Schuster and their new imprint, Simon Stream. We posted a blog post about it earlier in the week. We should soon be able to officially announce MMS Book 1 soon. Working with Simon & Schuster will not affect The Bookshop Mysteries in any way. We intend to keep writing those books for as long as people want to keep reading them.
Next week (26th to 30th October) is half term, so we are going away for a long weekend and won’t be back until Wednesday, but our intention is to get the rest of The Bookshop Mysteries Book 7 to final first draft.