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 1477:
As expected, yesterday I worked steadily on my editing, but ended up doing more adding then cutting. The progress continued to be slow since I was working with the gobbledygook of my earliest dictation attempts. I hope to have edited all this section by the end of this week. If so, and I have been able to start writing the last chapters in the book, I will certainly have something to celebrate next Sunday.
There were two exciting things about yesterday, one was that I finally heard about my surgery on my trigger finger. It turns out that all the person calling was establishing is whether or not I was willing to take the next available opening or if there were particular times when I wanted the surgery.
Since the injury happened over four months ago, and they said the first openings were going to be in November and December, needless-to-say, I said put me on the first available list. They said that usually scheduling was about four weeks out, so the bestcase scenario is that I get a call sometime in October for November. Meanwhile, my goal is to get this first draft completely done and in good enough shape to hand out to beta readers by November.
The other exciting thing that happened yesterday was that just as we were starting to get ready for bed, I noticed that our water dispenser was leaking and there was a substantial puddle on our hardwood floor. Besides mopping up the floor, we had to figure out how to drain the dispenser, which was holding about six or seven gallons in it, to get the amount left in it low enough so that my husband could wrestle it outside. So we filled up numerous jugs (which is providing us water today.)
The dispenser is quite old, in fact, when I called this morning to order a new one, the man laughed when he saw how old the model was and how long we have had it. They will deliver a new one on Friday. All in all, I’m very thankful that we noticed it before we went to bed, because if it had all night to drain, it could have been a real nightmare this morning.
Otherwise, today is moving forward as normal. I’ve had yoga, done the cleaning, paid the bills for the month, and had my first walk of the day. we have a phone call scheduled with our daughter to hear all about our grandsons’ first weeks of school, and then if all goes well, I should have time to edit this afternoon.
My husband saw the first skeleton go up for Halloween yesterday, which reminded me to get out my fall wreath to put on the door. I also got a shot of the full moon last night. Clouds obscured it, but it was bright and properly ghostly.
If you enjoy my daily posts and would like to subscribe for free or become a patron (where you will get the pleasure of giving me the resources to spend more time writing and less time marketing) click the little button below. In addition, please do click on the heart so I know you’ve been to visit and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments! Thanks!
I endured the mosquitos last night to see the partial eclipse of the moon. Worth the experience as the moon was larger than normal. Wishing you a speedy appointment!
Sorry about your watery mess! Glad to hear that you’re getting help for your finger.