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 1470:
As predicted, it is cooler today, which means that I plan to take my second walk before lunch. In addition, I was pleased that, except for a few stray ants on the kitchen and master bathroom counters, I seem to have successfully countered the massive invasion of ants that I faced yesterday morning. This mat that when I swept, I found absolutely no ants in the dust pan, which means that they weren’t busy running around scouting. I have no illusions that this is the last battle in this particular season’s annual influx. On the other hand, the fact that the weather is cooler and we may get some early morning dew may help, because the general explanation for why this is the time of year that we often battle ants in San Diego is that they are coming inside looking for moisture.
Yesterday, I did get in some good editing, including cutting 500 words and making it through two more chapters. However, what I was really concentrating on, was going back and putting in some material to foreshadow some plot threads that suddenly have appeared in the second half of the book. This takes time because I have to quickly skim through earlier chapters, looking for places where it would be appropriate to put in a couple of sentence, or in some cases, whole paragraphs.
In addition, recently I also noticed some continuity issues where I said the main character was going somewhere the next day, but evidently I decided to skip that trip, so now I had to go back and find those references and remove them.
I have no expectation that there won’t be a few of these continuity issues that will still remain, even if I do another thorough reading of this draft before I start sending it off to beta readers. But the more I find now, the better.
Besides a phone call, an the second walk, I have the rest of the day free to continue editing. Here are two flower pictures from my walk this morning.
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I think the editing is a hard part of the job!