2023 Year in Review Ta da! List

Daily Diary, December 31, 2023, Day 1216:

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.

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I have a lot to celebrate in this round-up for the year, including the fact that I accomplished most of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year. However, I think the most significant achievement is how I feel about my life as I make this end of year review. I am about to turn 74, and I think that the words that I resonate most to are contentment and gratitude.

Not that there haven’t been ups and downs with my health, and certainly there have been distressing events going on in the world around me and in the lives of cherished friends and family. Yet, in general, in my personal life, when I look back over the past four years, not much has changed. And I am very contented with the life I have constructed.…and enormously grateful for this state of affairs.

This is not to say that I don’t recognize that the unexpected vicissitudes of life could upset my particular apple cart at any time, but all the more reason to celebrate the present, including reviewing some of the specific accomplishments of the past year.

My fiction writing and publishing:

First, I finished and published the fourth book in my Caelestis series, Tides of Acerba this year. I started the project in late July 2022, and published the novel in May of 2023. This meant I was able to complete the whole book in eleven months, from beginning to end. This is my normal pace for a full-length novel, so I was quite pleased.

A second goal for the year had been to to write and publish, In Ddaera’s Embrace, the fifth and final book in this series. While I didn’t achieve that goal, I have written over 63,000 words in this book, and if all goes well, I should get it completed and published by early spring. Again, this would mean it will have taken me slightly less than a year to complete this novel. Writing one full length novel in a year is a very reasonable goal for me, and one that I do think I can continue to sustain going on in the next couple of years. Very much a reason to feel content.

However, what I particularly want to celebrate is the success of my experiment with writing the Victorian San Francisco Mystery novella, Dandy and the Dognappers, and putting each chapter up as I wrote it on substack. I started working on this novella the day I published Tides of Acerba in the beginning of May of this year, and published it at the end of August, in short, it took less than four months to write a 26,000 word novella. I was particularly pleased to discover that, despite having been available for free through my substack newsletter, this novella has sold very well.

Doing a very rough calculation, between finishing Tides of Acerba, writing Dandy and the Dognappers, and writing the bulk of In Ddaera’s Embrace, I wrote over 127,000 words. In short, I am very pleased with my accomplishments in the area of fiction.

However, I also wrote and published a lot in the area of non-fiction, if I look at my newsletters, particularly my daily posts.

My Substack Newsletters:

Simply continuing to maintain the unbroken streak of writing and sending out my daily diary, An Aging Author’s Daily Diversions substack newsletter every day is a reason to celebrate. (Today’s post will be the 1216^th post I have done, if you count the Facebook posts I did before I switched to substack. For someone who started numerous diaries and journals over my life and never went any further than a month in keeping them up, this daily streak alone is an accomplishment.

As far as how this newsletter has done, a year ago, I had 391 subscribers, today I have 527, so the audience has grown, without me really doing anything particular to get a larger audience. While my open rate runs between 35 to 40%, I am very content with that open rate because I really don’t expect most of the subscribers to be so dedicated that they are willing to read a newsletter from me every single day!!!

I did create an option in September for subscribers to upgrade to paid if they wanted (not to get any perks beyond feeling warm and fuzzy to know they are supporting my work in this fashion) and I have had 12 upgrade to this level. I am thankful to everyone who has done so, however, my intention for this daily diary has never been to use this newsletter for financial support.

Instead, I’ve always seen it primarily as a way of engaging the community of people who have already discovered my books and enjoy getting a glimpse of my life and my writing process.

If the newsletter attracts others, for example authors interested in how I am able to sustain a career as an indie author, or people who are simply interested in what life is like for a writer in her seventies, this is simply a lovely secondary benefit to me.

Substack gives an author some statistics, and I confess I was surprised to learn that 39% of my subscribers are from outside the US, from 44 other countries, with Canada, UK, India, and for some reason Morocco, the largest single nations among the US subscribers!

I have also maintained a monthly promotional newsletter, again directed primarily at my existing fans of my books. This is the main way I can alert these fans when a new book comes out. However, since I don’t generally publish new fiction more than twice in a year, I try to keep fans engaged by telling them about my progress, alerting them to any discounts on my already existing work, or providing links to promotions of books in the mystery, historical fiction, and science fiction genres. As a result, I’ve been able to maintain a subscriber base of slightly over 3000.

My Balanced and Healthy life:

While of course I wanted to celebrate my fiction and non-fiction writing, however, I think what most pleases me (and makes me content and grateful) about these achievements is that they didn’t prevent me from also maintaining my physical and emotional well-being and balanced life as an aging writer.

The first area to celebrate under this heading, is that 2023 continued to be a year where I maintained my connection to friends and family, as well as my ability to be of service to others. This was true, even though the risks associated with my chronic health issues have continued to preclude traveling or spending time in crowded indoor environments. Periodic zoom calls, daily phone calls, plus the comments and emails I get from people who read my daily posts, mean that I never feel lonely, or isolated, or disconnected.

My second reason to celebrate is that despite some obstacles (broken toe, periodic styes, arthritis flare-up, some possible heart issues) I’ve continued to get enough daily exercise to help maintain and actually improve my health and emotional well-being. Particularly the past four months, I have been able to continue my cleaning regime that gives me some mild aerobic exercise, adjust my walks by breaking them in two so that I can still achieve 60 minutes a day, while adding on 30 minutes of chair pilates a day. I am therefore feeling stronger (and lighter) than I did at the beginning of the year.

What has helped me with my exercise routine are my daily newsletters (and my new habit of taking photos on my walk) and the audiobooks that I listen to while I clean, go on my walks, and when I do my chair Pilates exercises, the last which I have only consistently added in the last six months, and which I would have found hopelessly boring (smile.)

Our House Improvements:

Finally, this is an area to celebrate, because we action to make expenditures that will make our home of over thirty years a place that is comfortable, easy to maintain, and a safe place to age in place for as long as we wish.

These expenditures included year the first expenditure was to upgrade and expand our solar panels in order to support the used electric car (which we needed to suddenly replace last year when our catalytic converter was stolen) and our new heat pump to replace our aged gas furnace that had broken down. Not only are these changes keeping our costs in running the home down, but it has given us air conditioning for the first time, which is making the home more comfortable in this warming climate. You might notice that these expenditures, which we had been talking about for probably a decade, came about because of events outside our control, but hey, I am grateful for the much needed nudge by the universe.

A second nudge to spend money on our home came when after 3 years of drought we had an unusually wet winter and spring, which made us finally spend the money to put in new landscaping, which will be drought resistant and easy to maintain.

And finally, what will probably have the best long-term effect on our ability to age in place is we made the arrangements to have all three bathrooms totally remodeled (with all the important things like grab bars, fold down shower seat, hand held shower) in the coming months of 2024.

So all-in-all, 2023 was a great year with a lot to celebrate.

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