July has arrived with summer properly underway, Penny’s Diary gathering even more momentum, and my writing calendar becoming increasingly crowded in the best possible way.
I’ve got quite a lot happening in August, so I’m currently trying to get as far ahead as possible before everything speeds up. That means plenty of writing, planning, checking, and probably more late nights than I should admit to.
As always, thank you to everyone who continues to read, listen, comment, and follow Penny’s unfolding story. We’re heading into a particularly exciting part of her journey now, and I can’t wait to share where it leads.
If you’re new here, welcome! I send a Workbench Update each month — partly how the writing’s going, partly a look at what’s happening behind the scenes, partly a family photo album. Consider it a letter from where I sit, to where you sit, with AffinityVerse news, things I’ll be doing soon, and now and then a castle or a Dalek.
👉 Just joined? Penny’s Diary is a really good place to start — a weekly, character-driven mystery unfolding one entry at a time.
👉 Want to explore more of the AffinityVerse? If Penny’s Diary has sparked your curiosity, there’s a whole world waiting beyond its pages. The Rogue Ghost Podcast opens the door to the larger AffinityVerse — a globe-spanning mystery built around magic, history, and the long shadows cast by twelve Puzzle Boxes. Explore at your own pace and discover how these stories quietly connect.
Right now, I’m working on the August cycle of Penny’s Diary, covering Weeks 30 through 34.
This is where Penny’s story does more than simply connect with the wider AffinityVerse. It crashes straight into it — or, perhaps more accurately, Penny drops directly into the middle of something much larger than she expected.
The diary remains firmly grounded in Penny’s voice, friendships, and increasingly complicated life in Meridia Falls, but the boundaries around her story begin to shift. Pieces of wider AffinityVerse lore move much closer, familiar ideas take on new meaning, and Penny starts discovering that the world beyond her own mystery is considerably stranger than she realized.
It’s an ambitious five-week cycle, with a lot of moving parts, emotional turns, new connections, and unexpected allies entering the story. That is exactly why I’m trying to get ahead now. Once this part starts moving, it does not slow down easily.
The next Penny’s Diary entry to arrive will be Week 29 on July 23, 2026.
Penny, Ellie, and Teddy have spent weeks gathering fragments, preserving evidence, and trying to understand the strange rules governing their lives. In Week 29, one carefully planned attempt to uncover the truth takes them somewhere far darker than expected — and reveals a kind of AffinityVerse magic they can no longer dismiss, explain away, or safely observe from a distance.
As missing memories become weapons, private choices are taken away, and the growing danger around Marilyn Moreau finally erupts in public, Penny and her friends are pushed beyond investigation and into survival. By the end of the week, they will have witnessed the impossible, gained a frightening new form of proof, and been given a lifeline that comes with no promise it will work.
And with Clearwater approaching once again, Penny must place her trust not only in letters, Polaroids, and recovery anchors — but in whether her new apartment can remember the life she has built inside it.
And here are a few Polaroids from the expanded PDF version, offering a sneak peek at some of the moments waiting in Week 29.
Just a quick note to say that the Penny’s Diary Catch-Up Page has now been updated to include Weeks 22 through 25.
So if you’ve missed any entries, or just want an easy way to dip back into the story and get your bearings before the newest diary pages, you can catch up here:
If you’re enjoying Penny’s Diary, supporting readers can unlock the most immersive versions of the story.
The audio editions bring Penny’s voice to life, capturing the emotion, rhythm, and hesitation behind each entry.
The diary editions recreate the feeling of reading Penny’s actual journal — complete with Polaroids, sketches, notes, and the little details she tucks between the pages.
Together they offer the most complete way to experience Penny’s world.
👉 Become a Supporting Reader
Your support helps keep the AffinityVerse growing — one story, one mystery, and one diary page at a time.
This month we visited Nunnington Hall for the first time, and it immediately earned a place on our revisit list.
Set beside the River Rye in North Yorkshire, the hall has more than 700 years of history and has evolved from a medieval property into the atmospheric country house seen today. Inside, its period rooms, artwork, and miniature-room collection give it plenty to explore, while outside the organic garden, orchard, wildflower areas, and riverside setting make it wonderfully easy to wander.
And then there were the peacocks.
They roam freely through the gardens, looking impressively regal and completely aware that everyone is photographing them. Unfortunately, none of them treated us to a full display, with their magnificent trains fanned out, but they still added a wonderfully unexpected bit of character to the visit — and made an already memorable place feel even more distinctive.
We’ve also made return visits to a few of our favorite National Trust and English Heritage places, taking the opportunity to revisit familiar routes, explore quieter corners, and enjoy the kind of places that always seem to reset the creative part of my brain.
We went to the cinema as a family to see the new Supergirl movie.
There had been quite a bit of negativity surrounding it beforehand, so I went in unsure what to expect. In the end, though, we all really enjoyed it. It offered a different interpretation of the character, but one that I found much more engaging than I expected.
I may even have preferred it to the new Superman movie.
More broadly, it feels as though the traditional blockbuster model is going through a difficult period at the moment. Perhaps Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will prove me completely wrong, but some of the smaller, stranger, and more distinctive films seem to be generating much more interest.
Obsession was one of those for me. I found it genuinely unnerving at times, and although it was not a huge spectacle, its unusual premise and atmosphere stayed with me.
I was less taken with Backrooms and Iron Lung, but I can understand why films like them are attracting attention. Audiences increasingly seem to be looking for something unfamiliar — stories with their own identity, unusual ideas, and a willingness to break away from the expected formula.
Not every experiment will work for everyone, but I would much rather see this new generation of filmmakers take creative risks than simply repeat what has already been done.
The Hachette half-size Dalek build is moving forward again.
After the wheel fault I mentioned last month, I had to strip the base back down so the replacement parts could be fitted. That was certainly a challenge — especially after thinking that particular stage of the build was already safely behind me.
The replacements are now installed, though, and I’ve been able to continue. The underside of the base is finally complete, which means the only way is up. Quite literally.
I already have several of the next parts waiting, so it should not be too long before the build starts going vertical. At that point, we may need to begin seriously considering a larger house.
Apparently, “half-size” is a very misleading phrase when the subject is a Dalek.
July marks the anniversary of the release of my novel World’s End,first published in 2019.
Although it was not the first AffinityVerse story to be published, it was actually the first one I wrote. The original draft came together during a NaNoWriMo event in November 2015, when it was intended to begin a series called The Stolen Affinity Chronicles. Looking back at it now, I can see so many of the ideas that would later spread into everything else.
The early seeds are all there: hidden histories, unusual abilities, damaged memories, interconnected lives, and the sense that something much larger is operating just beyond what the characters can see.
Some of those ideas later found new shapes in the original Meridia Falls books and the Cassie Collins series. Others continued evolving until they became part of the revamped AffinityVerse through The Rogue Ghost Podcast and this new version of Penny’s Diary.
That makes World’s End especially interesting for me to revisit. It is not simply an older novel. It is an early map of a universe that had not yet fully revealed itself.
Rather than quietly removing these earlier books from sale, I’m planning to rebrand them under the banner Visions of the AffinityVerse. That feels like the right way to preserve them: stories from an earlier creative phase, still meaningful and connected to the larger tapestry, but clearly presented as earlier interpretations rather than the current central continuity.
That’s what’s on the workbench this month — Penny falling into a much wider mystery, a new historic favorite filled with roaming peacocks, cinema trips offering some unexpected surprises, and a Dalek finally preparing to rise.
As always, thank you for being part of this ongoing adventure. Whether you’re here for Penny’s mystery, the wider AffinityVerse, the historic wandering, or simply the occasional update on an increasingly enormous Dalek, I’m grateful to have you along.
And I’d love to hear from you in the comments: have you discovered somewhere new recently that you already want to revisit, or watched something that felt genuinely different from everything else around it?
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