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.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.
Daily Diary, Day 1559:
Starting tomorrow, I am going to begin publishing the short story, Tilly Tracks a Thief for free, scene by scene, finishing up the week of Christmas, which seemed fitting because the story is set in the week before Christmas, 1881.
But first, today I am going to explain why I chose to give this very minor character in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series a story of her own.
As I wrote in the introduction to my second volume of short stories, one of the reasons I wrote the story Tilly Tracks a Thief was that I was in the ninth month of socially isolating because of Covid—and I really needed to take my imagination outside the confines of the four walls of my home. I thought this might be true for my readers as well, so I wrote a story that would take them outside the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse to traverse the streets of San Francisco. In addition, I wanted to expand on what I knew about the youngest boardinghouse servant, “little Tilly,” and so I gave her the chance to act in a Christmas story.
Tilly Gallagher first showed up in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series in my second novel, Uneasy Spirits, when I needed someone to step in and help out in the boardinghouse. This story had the main domestic servant, Kathleen, accompanying my protagonist, Annie Fuller, as she did her investigation. Having already established how difficult it was to be a servant in a large household in Maids of Misfortune, it seemed important to address how this was going to start putting a burden on Kathleen. In the plot of Uneasy Spirits, I had introduced an old friend of Kathleen, Biddy O’Malley, so it seemed useful make Biddy’s cousin, Tilly, be the temporary servant Annie hired. At the time all I knew about Tilly was that she had recently arrived from Ireland and was living in the large O’Malley household.
Over time, Biddy O’Malley became an ever more important character in the series, finally becoming the main character in the last novel I wrote in the series, Entangled Threads. Consequently, I knew more and more about her family. For example, by the time I wrote Tilly Tracks a Thief, Biddy’s mother (and Tilly’s aunt) had a story of her own, Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery. This gave me more information about Tilly’s personal life to work with—which you will see in the first scene of the story I will put up on substack tomorrow.
I love how having a series, one where I have been able to write shorter works that feature minor characters, lets me slowly build a more and more complex picture of characters. Tilly is a good example.
When first introduced, besides describing Tilly as small, with black curls and blue eyes, I didn’t know much about her beyond the fact that she was very young and shy. Each time Tilly showed up in subsequent stories, I, and therefore the readers, learn a little more about her. This was particularly true in the short story Dandy’s Discovery, which I wrote right before Tilly Tracks a Thief. But even in Dandy’s Discovery, I didn’t feel I could spare the time to go into the girl’s back history, and giving her a story all her own revealed her to be an altogether braver person than I had expected.
So, enjoy reading, or rereading this Tilly Tracks a Thief, as Tilly turns what could be a tragedy into the best Christmas ever!
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I like these posts explaining your process.
I've always thought it was very clever of you to make your thesis material available to "the masses" by putting it into a cozy (feminist) mystery format. And now I think you're very clever to have a series that has both novels and short stories so you have flexibility develop minor characters.
Great fun as you and we get to know a new person!