Writing Progress Log : W/E 31st July 2026

The entire week has been dedicated to writing. Amanda is away this week with the kids. She’s in Turkey with her sister and the cousins. I usually stay at home when Amanda goes away with her sister and use that week as an opportunity to do tasks around the house, which I did. I had some ceilings to paint downstairs after some water damage last year, and I’ve started redecorating my son’s bedroom.

But the primary task for this week was to finish MMS-Book-1 as we have a deadline with the publisher for the first week of September, and I want to do a few editing and revision passes before I submit the manuscript. Unfortunately, that means I didn’t work on the Bookshop Mysteries this week. I hoped to do a few chapters for that book, but it didn’t happen. I will catch up next week, but MMS-Book-1 has a submission deadline and The Bookshop Mysteries doesn’t, so I had to prioritise.

For MMS-Book-1, though, I was VERY productive and I wrote Chapters 45 to 54 (10 chapters in total) with a word count of 12,183. That means I got to write the words ‘The End’ at the end of the book, which was a great feeling.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to finish this book. Both myself and Amanda have had so much fun writing this book that we really can’t wait to share it with you. The publisher said they will likely announce it sometime in September, which means we will be deep in the edit process with one of their editors. The book is, I hope, a really fun read, but I’m not allowed to say anything else, and that’s killing me because I want to talk about it. I will just have to be patient.

I’m planning a more detailed article about our writing process, but I want to mention I have been trying dictation more recently. Every one of our books has at least five to ten chapters where I tried dictation again. It really is a useful way of getting a first draft down, but I always found Scrivener’s built-in dictation tool very clunky, so I would use it a little and then just revert back to typing. A lot of writers I know have been using a dictation tool called Plaud, so I decided to give it a try and WOW. It is really good. It does a fantastic job of transcribing the recordings and then formatting it into prose with correct punctuation and speech attribution tags. It’s not perfect, far from it. I would say it’s 80% effective, BUT that’s way better than before, meaning the edit process taking a chapter from dictation to a first draft is faster. For MMS-Book-1, I have dictated the last 23 chapters of the book, so I am getting quite comfortable with Plaud as a tool, so I think it’s here to stay. Lots of authors do dictation for their first draft. If anything, I am late to the party. Dictation is hard. It feels weird, and it takes a LOT of practice, but I think I've begun to master it.

The Bookshop Mysteries Book 6 - A Fatal Encore Audiobook

A quick update on the Fatal Encore audiobook. The production deadline for recording the book was 31st July, and Emily Mount, our narrator, has completed all the recording, and as of the end of this week, most of the chapter recordings have been uploaded. I’m just waiting on the last few chapters. Once I have them, I can listen to the whole book and approve the project. Once that happens, the audiobook goes into Audible’s review process, which usually takes ten working days. So, provided there are no issues, the audiobook should be out mid-August. What I’ve listened to so far sounds great, and I can’t wait to release it. I want to thank Emily especially, as she has had to record this book while the UK has been going through a heatwave, so sitting in a small soundproof cupboard recording an audiobook when our houses in the UK don’t have air-conditioning is hard.