Writing Progress Log : W/E 7th August 2026
I inadvertently ended up taking Monday and Tuesday off this week. At the weekend, I began redecorating my son’s bedroom, and that took WAY longer than I estimated. To be honest, taking a couple of days out after a busy week finishing MMS Book 1 was probably a good idea.
For the rest of the week, we wrote three chapters for Bookshop Mysteries Book 7 - A Ring of Roses, Chapters 12, 13 and 14, which totalled 3100 words. I spent some time during that drafting, updating our plan and outline as part of the story is going to go in a slightly different direction than originally planned. It’s still the same killer and primary clues and red herrings, but the journey we take to get to the end will be a little different.
On Tuesday evening, Amanda arrived back home with the kids after a holiday in Turkey with her sister and the cousins. Now she has settled back into a routine, she has been working her way through the edits on the remaining chapters of MMS Book 1. She has six chapters left to go through, and as she has done seven chapters this week, so I also spent time going through all her changes (which are on paper) and applying them to the master document in Scrivener. It’s time-consuming, but it makes for a better end result as I have to really think about the changes as I edit the document. Amanda is planning on finishing her edits by the end of the weekend.
Once Amanda has finished those edits, she will turn her attention back to A Ring of Roses. I have until the 7th of September to do edits and revisions to MMS Book 1 before I have to submit it to the publisher, and I think we are well on track for hitting that. I should finish my first full read-through and edit pass by Tuesday next week. Then, I’ll let the manuscript sit for a week untouched while I focus purely on A Ring of Roses. Then I will do another edit pass on MMS Book 1 ready for submission.
One final note, I finished listening to the audiobook for Bookshop Mysteries Book 6 - A Fatal Encore. The audiobook is now in the Audible review queue, so should be available in the next few weeks.