Daily Diary, Day 1242:
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.
Brief check-in: Had a lovely birthday yesterday, lots of happy birthday wishes, and I chose not to try to squeeze all my regular exercise and writing into an already busy day! Today has turned out to be busy as well, with yoga, extra cleaning, grocery orders, unscheduled phone call that I took while walking, and I have another phone call after lunch. I swear, however, I am going to get in some more words!
And now on to what I’ve been doing to entertain myself these past two weeks:
TV watching:
Besides an occasional home Improvement type reality show while I eat lunch (this week it was Home Town), my husband try to watch TV together between 6:30 and 8:30 before we start our before bed rituals. These last two weeks we finished up the new season of Reacher. Not sure I really recommend it—it has such a high body count--but I got invested in watching the bad guys get caught in the end. We also watched the first two episodes of True Detective (very creepy so far—so this might not be to everyone’s taste) and the first two episodes of Monsieur Spade, (with fictional PI Sam Spade living in France) which we both are quite liking.
We are also really enjoying Astrid, a French police procedural that features a young autistic woman researcher. The mysteries are intriguing but the growing relationship between the police detective and the young woman Astrid (as well as characters in Astrid’s autism support group) are what is making this series stand out; so I really recommend.
One night we came upon one of the Bourne movies and had fun rewatching it. I think this was to take the bad taste out of our mouth of some other thriller we had tried to watch and was very disappointing (I can’t even remember the name of it and I am certainly not going to recommend.) We are continuing to watch old reruns of Frazier if we have some time to kill right before we go to bed, and new episodes of Graham Norton (British talk show). The episode last night had me in stiches!
Listening
I finished the first book in Ursula Le Guin, Earth and Sea series, and I am now almost done with Laurie King’s most recent book Castle Shade. I am a big fan of the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes series, so I have been delighted to find I enjoy the audiobooks, since I am not sure I would have taken the time to read the most recent books in print.
I have been listening to the weekly Situation Normal podcasts by Michael Estrin, which I recommended last Friday in my list of newsletters I recommend, but I also have listened to an episode of What Now? with Trevor Noah, with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and a new podcast called Talking Pictures which is interviews with directors. It has just started, and I found the two episodes, one with Nancy Meyers (who does romcom movies), and one with Steven Soderberg, (who does an incredible variety of films, including the interviewer’s favorite--and one of mine--Out of Sightwith Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney).
Reading:
I am still slowly getting through the illustrated The Secret Garden, that I got for Christmas, savoring it (and tending to read a short bit as I wait for the kettle to come to a boil of tea!), and I am rereading my own Uneasy Spirits, right before bed because I have an idea for a short story I with one of the characters in that book. And of course, reading the daily newspaper, newsletters, and keeping up with my magazines, fills in the cracks during the day (smile.)
Anything new any of you wish to recommend for the rest of us? If so, do put in the comments.
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Happy Birthday! As someone once said, so happy you were born!!! All the best!
Belated happy birthdays. You are in good company - I had 4 others to send birthday greetings. All special people …tome and others.