Monday, April 14, 2025

Short 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 1685:

Yesterday morning, after I finished an hour doing the first part of my weekly Sunday clean of the downstairs (change and wash all the couch covers/dog blankets, dust all the book shelves in the den and the wall of shelves in the living room, scrub kitchen counter tops, dry mop and then wet mop the kitchen and den), I sat down to read some substack posts.

The first one included the statement, “You have a body. Where does it feel alive? Notice.” So, I did, and what I noticed besides feeling warm (because this particular series of actions over this amount of time does actually raise my heartbeat) was that my body, particularly my feet, were tingling.

Most of the time when I think about my feet (which I try not to do), like when I am coming to the end of a walk, it is because they feel like I am walking on rocks (effect of neuropathy I have had for decades), ache, or are actually painful. In contrast, the tingling I was feeling was actually relatively pleasant, reminding me not only that I had been able to ignore the discomfort while I was working (both because I was listening to audiobook and concentrating on the tasks at hand) but that the exercise had sent blood to that particular extremity like a nice massage. Very nice.

Since most of the morning was spent cleaning and working on a project I do every couple of weeks with a friend (we journal on topics and then share what we have written), I decided this was another good day to take it easy. I felt good about my steady progress on writing, having averaged 630 words a day for the six days I wrote last week, so a break seemed warrented.

I did do a walk after lunch, but the rest of the afternoon I read, finishing a very early book by my favorite author CJ Cherryh, with main characters a kind of intelligent species that look physically like humanoid lions. I think I read this series over 30 years ago, so I don’t remember it at all. It is sort of fun to see the origins of her later books in this series. Not quite as skillfully executed, but enjoyable never-the-less. Will probably start the next in the series as soon as I am done with this one.

Today, yoga was canceled, and it is still gray and chilly out, and it is not supposed to get above the very low 60s for the next couple of weeks. The better to enjoy the sun when it does peek out occasionally. After posting this I will go for my first walk and then write, with a phone call scheduled for late in the afternoon.

The flowers are really popping out every where now. Aren’t these gorgeous!

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