Friday, April 4, 2025,

Some tough stuff.

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. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1675:

This week the weather has varied considerably, alternating between clouds, drizzle, sun, fog, rain, and gusts of wind. This morning there aren’t any clouds and no wind, but quite cold, having gone down to 41 degrees last night. However, it is supposed to get up to a high of 76 by Sunday, and no more rain forecast for the next week or so.

My mood has varied as well, which makes sense given what has been going on in my nation (which of course has negative effects world-wide.) In my own personal life, besides watching our retirement savings rapidly contract, I have made good progress in terms of writing and walking. And when I talk to friends and family on the phone, many who are facing very serious crises, when they ask me how I am doing, I find myself saying, “Fine, actually better than I’ve been, not taking in account everything else that is going on,” and then I mentally wave my hand to indicate the awfulness of that “everything else.”

And, of course, that everything else does affect me. For example, yesterday I found myself crying as I finished skimming through the news, something that now happens almost every day at some point in the day.

I don’t cry easily for myself, but I do when I witness other people’s pain. And there is a lot of pain out there. In addition, I suspect my perspective as a professional historian has made me particularly saddened and angry since I spent my career studying the negative effects of nativism, racism, sexism, and unregulated capitalism on society in the 19^th century.

I also studied the successive waves of reformers who painstakingly worked to remedy the problems of poverty and unsafe work and living conditions, ridding our food, air, and water of pollutants, ending child labor and childhood diseases, opening up economic opportunities for people, no matter where they were born, the color of their skin, their sex or sexual orientation, and trying to rid our political process of the corruption that undermined our democracy and well-being as a nation. I even participated in some of those reform movements and benefited as the doors to higher education and a professional career as an historian opened up for women.

And now, I have to watch daily as those reforms are being dismantled at an unprecedented pace, with the stated determination of somehow returning us to those 19^th century conditions, with absolutely no understanding or concern about what this will mean for the vast majority of people, makes me furious.

And I weep in fear and frustration. Because I honestly am not sure that the destruction and the accompanying trauma that has already occurred and will continue to occur if not stopped, can be repaired, at least in my life-time.

Yet, yesterday the tears also came as I read a story in a substack newsletter with the subtitle: “music, healing, friendship and the human spirit,” about a woman who had spent the last five years recovering from a brain bleed that left her unable to speak, walk, write, or move the right side of her body.

This was not a happily-ever-after story, where by some miracle or even hard work a full recovery was achieved, nor was there any suggestion that somehow the lessons learned would make her life better than it had been. But neither was the story just about grief and pain and loss, but also about courage and resilience in face of trauma.

And that is what I hope for my country and its people.

I don’t expect we will ever fully recover from the damage that is being inflicted on us, just a person carries the experience of trauma in childhood into their future, this will happen. And I am not such an optimist to say we will learn and come out better for going through and surviving this particular trauma. But I can hope that with courage and resilience we, collectively and individually, can begin to heal and rebuild our lives, just as that young woman is doing, rebuild lives and a nation where there is laughter as well as tears, where my daughter and my grandchildren can feel safe and respected and have lives worth living.

Ok, I apologize to those of you who read these daily posts for the serenity of seeing flowers and hearing of my rather boring activities, and find this sort of post difficult. And it is not my intent to suddenly change the nature of my posts. But I also assume that most of you follow me because you are fans of my fiction, and this means that you have not been put off by the degree to which my mysteries or science fiction deal with hard and difficult truths.

But it also just felt wrong to maintain complete silence about what is happening, when silence might be read as acceptance or even agreement with the reckless decisions being made at all levels, through all institutions, in America right now.

So, this is my version of what the millions of people who go out to protest tomorrow are saying…we are not in support of what is happening and we will not acquiesce. Those reformers I studied, abolitionists, women’s suffragists, progressives, native American and civil rights protesters, labor organizers, anti-war activists, environmentalists, etc. often did not live to see the successes of their movements…but they persisted, with courage, resilience, and even laughter mixed in with their tears.

If you are interested in finding out where one of these Hands Off protests are happening near you, this link should help.

But I will also leave you with a few of the flowers I saw on my walk today.

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