Friday, May 2, 2025

Short stuff and lots of roses!

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 1703:

Yesterday was one of those days where I had to make a choice about whether or not to get in more writing, or both of my walks…and I chose the second walk. I did get a little over 300 words written, starting a new scene, so I hope that will give me a good start today.

Yesterday morning, as my husband was about to take our dog Leeza out for her first walk, she started barking…which she does when she takes exception to certain dogs that are going up and down our street. We are on a one block cul-de-sac, which means if they go down, they go up again quite soon, gives her two chances to bark. She will ignore some dogs, but others really upset her. Who knows why.

Anyway, when we looked out to see who was walking a dog that early in the morning what we saw was an opossum across the street, ambling slowly from yard to yard, heading up the street away from the canyon that is at the end of the cul-d-sac. We had a mother and offspring come raid our birdfeeder several years ago, and I would love to have one visit again.

We have been watching 3 shows with overlapping actors. I, Jack Wright, has John Simm, who we first became familiar with in the series Life On Mars (which we liked enough to buy on DVD, and I suspect we will be rewatching that soon! He is also in the second series we are rewatching, Collateral.Very different characters, equally well done. In Collateral, there is also Nicola Walker, who is also in the show, Anika, that we are rewatching. In this case not so different roles, but then we pretty much came to love Walker in Unforgotten. Anyway, we are in a good patch watching these shows each night, plus The Good Place during dinner, and Mad About You right before bed. I like it when we hit a good patch of TV watching, no browsing and becoming frustrated or having to make a decision between not too exciting choices.

Today, I’ve done yoga (only one on zoom, but my daughter later said she and another 3 were at the studio in person, so I didn’t feel guilty about the teacher having to only teach one person!) I also ordered cleaned, ordered groceries and will now go for a walk so as to be back before the groceries are ordered.

I think I will now try to do a couple of days where I focus on showing you roses of certain colors, in this case pinkish, yellow.

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