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 1461:
I hope you all enjoyed my new Sunday post, which I have subtitled A Small Moment of Delight. I will continue forward alternating this with my TaDa List posts on Sundays. Today, I am doing another one of my short stuff posts, trying to limit the amount of time I spend on these regular daily posts so that I can carve out more time today to do editing.
Yesterday, was a fairly busy day. The new Sunday post took a fair amount of time to write, and I also had done well over an hour of deep cleaning in the downstairs. But nevertheless, I got through two scenes of the next chapter and ended up being able to cut about 160 words.
I was actually surprisingly pleased by the fact that those two scenes were in fairly decent shape. This morning, after I get this post up the border collie, Rio, will come over to play. Then, since the phone call that I had scheduled in the afternoon has been rescheduled, and I’ve already done one of my walks, I should have several hours, both in the morning and afternoon, to continue editing.
I looked over the last three weeks and discovered that I started the editing process on August 14 and when I look at the number of words I have cut and the number of chapters I’ve gone through I seem to be making steady progress at slightly over a chapter edited a day, and I have cut over 8000 words. If you remember from an earlier post, my minimum goal for this first read through of the manuscript was to cut 10,000 words. So, since I still have about 16 more chapters to edit, I should have no trouble exceeding that goal, even If I end up having to add more words occasionally.
It Is still overcast today and supposed to get slightly warmer as the beginning of a definite heat spell (for us) by Thursday the high temperature is supposed to be 85, which for us is quite warm and from experience this probably means that by late afternoon in our backyard, it will be at least in low 90s. We didn’t have to turn on the AC much last week, but I think this will not be true this coming week.
I’m going to leave you with two photos of a simply gorgeous rose. The first one I took yesterday when it was just starting to bloom, and the second one I took this morning. I was particularly captivated this morning by the little drops, which were most likely from the sprinkler, and definitely not raindrops, because we haven’t rain for some time. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think of the Sound of Music song.
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FYI As a public service I thought I should point out that today is Monday.
The live recording by the John Coltrane Quartet of "My Favorite Things" is sublime