Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.
Daily Diary, Day 1480:
Waiting for groceries to be delivered. Just finished a walk, and since I spent an hour doing a thorough cleaning upstairs this morning I may or may not take a second walk today. Yesterday I did write some new words, although I found myself going back a few chapters to clarify material that I will be addressing in these new chapters. I also did a little thinking, because I don’t firmly have exactly what is going to happen in these next couple chapters. This may mean that I will write, and then delete, and then write, then rearrange, a fair amount over the next week or two.
There was a bit of excitement after dinner. The fire alarm at the landing went off, for no particular reason (these are new--part of recommendation by remodel company to make sure house passed city inspection). This happened once before, loud siren and voice warning that a fire has been detected, and we couldn’t determine why. The excitement was that as my husband went up the stairs to see if he could turn it off, and as I went to the bottom of the stairs, our dog (69 lbs) ran into me as she flew up the stairs behind him, knocking me over. I seem to have scrapped arms on the metal stair railing, then bounced off the small cabinet next to the stairs, and landed on the floor. Rather shook up, but no bones broken, just a flap of skin on left forearm peeled back, and another triangle tear on the other elbow, which I didn’t discover until morning when I was confused by blood on the sheets!
Anyway, I have the drill for handling these tears—so they are both now clean, with steri-strips holding the flaps in place, and then bandages over to soak up any continued bleeding and keep clean. Not even any new aches and pains this morning, so I evidently had a relatively soft landing! But as any of you who are like me, in the senior years, know, these little falls are scary because we know too many people where a little fall leads to big health problems. Arthritis I can deal with, broken hip…don’t ever want to go there.
The weather today continues to be cloudy, although every once in a while the sun will peek out. The weather forecast for now seems to say that we are going to continue to have partly cloudy days with the highs in the mid 70s. Very pleasant fall weather.
Apart for putting laundry away and putting the groceries away, I have no phone calls scheduled and no other chores to do so. I’m hoping this means I will making good progress on the writing.
I thought these three photos from recent walks representative of season. First is a couple of the sunflowers that are hanging on. The second is the single rose still blooming on a rose bush, the third is the first Halloween decoration I’ve seen.
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I share your aversion to broken hip. My right hip is
Hip has been broken twice. Not fun.