Writing Progress Log : W/E 24th July 2026

It has been a productive week. We started Monday with the first kick-off meeting with our new publisher for the new book, MMS-Book-1. My first question was, can we talk about this publishing deal yet? Their answer was to hold off for the moment as they have a plan for announcing the new series. We really want to tell you all what’s going on, but you’ll need to wait a little longer. We are very excited though. The publisher is awesome and they have an unbelievable team of people with an impressive pedigree in the industry.

Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning were spent doing some planning and outlining. MMS-Book-1 is nearly written; well, the first draft anyway, and we have to deliver a manuscript to the publisher at the start of September ready to go into their editing process. Our first priority was to outline the remainder of the book as we are quite close to finishing, so we now have the finale outlined.

I also did a similar exercise for A Ring of Roses, and we have outlined the next five chapters.

Bookshop Mysteries Book 7 - A Ring of Roses

Due to spending some of the week outlining the two books, the amount of words written was lower, but that’s fine as we are still making good forward progress. I (Steve) wrote chapter 10 (1113 words) and delivered it to Amanda. Amanda also had the first nine chapters in her folder to edit. She has been exceptionally busy with her day job the past few weeks, so she hadn't had time for editing, but she has now gone through the first nine chapters, so I have been incorporating her changes into the master document.

Amanda prefers to edit on paper with a red pen. That may sound a little archaic, but it’s actually a benefit. Working from paper forces Amanda to read and edit slowly as she needs to handwrite her notes. Also, I have to take time to interpret her writing and incorporate the changes into Scrivener. Slowing down like that means, we believe, we end up with a better draft. I intend to draft more chapters next week and we are both very happy with the progress of this book.

MMS-Book-1

We had a very productive week with MMS-Book-1. I managed to draft four chapters (chapters 41 to 44), totalling 5648 words. The outline certainly helped here. Amanda is going on holiday next week with the kids, her sister, and the cousins. I don’t usually go on holiday with Amanda’s sister, so I will be making good use of that week. My ideal plan is to complete the draft for MMS-Book-1. It’s a bit of a stretch goal, but we’ll see how I get on.