Friday, January 19, 2024: Newsletter Recommendations
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.
Daily Diary, Day 1235:
My first recommendation today is going to include a podcast by one of my favorite humorist newsletter writers, Michael Estrin. He writes a newsletter, Situation Normal, where on his about page his bio says he “writes and tells stories from his life that are funny, heartfelt, vulnerable, and sometimes even profound.” This is a good description of his newsletter posts.
Recently he has added a once-a week podcast, which often expands on a blog post he has written. And this week, while I was waiting for new episodes from the podcasts I usually listen to when walking, I decided to try one. I ended up enjoying the format (he tells the stories to an old friend) and this makes the whole bit more of a conversation and adds to the humor. I would recommend starting with the first podcast, which hooked me. The title of this episode is Michael Meets George Burns (and blows it.)
If you aren’t that into podcasts, I would suggest that you read one of his regular newsletter posts. The one I am recommending is the one where he gives predictions for 2024. After so many lists of people seriously discussing what they hoped to accomplish in 2024, this was a nice contrast.
My second recommendation is of the writer (and poet) Chris La Tray, and his newsletter, An Irritable Metis. In his about page he comments on the newsletter title writing, “I am a member of a tribe of Indians who were called the ‘landless’ Indians of Montana for more than 150 years. Think about that. Indigenous people in North America, landless? Wouldn’t that make you irritable too?”
He is currently the Montana Poet Laureate for 2023-25 and a beautiful writers.
The two posts by him I have chosen to recommend today are about personal routines he has created and followed. They reminded me of the routines I have created with my daily posts. The first is a post where he looks at a goal he set for 2023 to spend 1000 hours outside. The title of the post is Something with Essence. The second is a post called A Few More Sentences—14. This is a post of the sentences he wrote daily for December, and they reflect another routine he follows that really spoke to me.
I do hope you enjoy both of these authors, and will consider subscribing to their newsletters.
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