Monday, April 21, 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 1692:

I do hope that all of you who were able to get together with friends and family this weekend, whether to celebrate Easter or take advantage of school and work closings, found joy. My husband came home from a walk on Sunday to announce how much fun it was to see some young girls dressed in their Sunday best zipping around on scooters.

For my part, after another day of relative rest, I was able to do a 40 minute walk, which not only had me passing several houses with lots of people out front (in once case the two young people in the family seemed to be checking to see how many eggs they had found, in another case some adults were playing some sort of beanbag game (cornhole?).

I am starting to notice a pattern. If I have a really good but busy week (hitting all my writing and exercise goals, plus all my zoom meetings and phone calls), when I get to the weekend, I feel the need to slow down. For one thing, because my yoga class is so early (I need to be up by 4:45 to get ready), and I often wake up 30-40 minutes before the alarm goes off, I don’t get enough sleep 2-3 times during the week. So, I have been sleeping in a bit on weekends, which is helping me catch up, but also eats into time Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Then, in turn, while I do a basic cleaning every morning (straitening, light dusting, and sweeping) that takes about 30 minutes, I do a more thorough cleaning on the weekends, usually doing the upstairs (bathrooms, thorough dusting, changing sheets, thorough sweep and dust mop of floors) on Saturdays, then even more thorough cleaning of downstairs, with added wet mopping of den and kitchen on Sundays. The result, cleaning on Saturdays takes 45-50 minutes, and Sundays often at least an hour, if not more. So, you add late start, a zoom meeting Saturdays, and I start to feel a crunch to get both walks in, and the amount of time left for writing gets pushed to the afternoon.

In the past I would have pushed myself to do both, or at least try to get in the full sixty minutes of walking. But this weekend, like last Sunday, I gave myself permission to take a real break. I only walked 30 minutes on Saturday and 40 on Sunday. And I didn’t work on Mr. Wong to the Rescue at all. And didn’t feel guilty!

So today I feel raring to go. I even slept until right before the alarm went off this morning, so didn’t lose as much sleep, despite getting up for yoga. I felt very centered and strong during yoga (mind didn’t stray as much and I was able to retain my breath during those sections where this is called for in the exercises.).

I’ve now done my 30 minute cleaning, done some personal journaling, I have just completed my first walk of the day, and I want to get this posted before Rio the border collie comes over to play…and it’s not even 9 am. No phone calls scheduled and I should definitely have time for second walk and writing!

Meanwhile, more flowers (gorgeous yellow roses) and a bunny.

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