Monday, July 14, 2025

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 1776:

Edgar and friends: This morning, Junior is still high up in his corner, off the downstairs bathroom, but soon after yesterday’s post, Miss Teeny disappeared again. She is so small it is possible she found some place to hide that I can’t see. However, I am Very excited to announce that Edgar seems to have caught something overnight, since he is now sitting in his web with something all wrapped up in a whiteish cocoon under him. Good for Edgar—and I hope is was something like an ant that I would have probably killed anyway. This is the life-long vegetarian speaking…no doubt also shaped by my early readings of Charlotte’s Web and poor Wilbur.

Hope you all enjoyed my cover reveal yesterday.

In general, I felt good about the work I did on the novella this weekend. Saturday I was mostly editing, with more words deleted than added, but yesterday I actually added 600 new words. I also got my sixty minutes of walking done, but found with the greater heat (and the longer time spent in cleaning) that dividing the walk in three twenty-minute increments worked quite well.

Also got through a couple of short stories, caught a Coopers Hawk in our olive tree. It had landed on the fence near the bird feeder a couple of days earlier, but I didn’t get any photos. Hard to see even in this photo, but impressive in size.

Today I have been finishing the cleaning downstairs in several bits. I’ve done twenty minutes so far. I couldn’t do everything yesterday because Rio the border collie came over to play yesterday rather than today because my husband has a teeth cleaning scheduled for this morning.

In order to break up the time I am up on my feet, I did some cleaning after breakfast, then took my first thirty-minute walk. I will then finish cleaning, rest, and I should still have time to get in the second walk before lunch, which I need to do because I have a phone call scheduled before dinner.

Somewhere in all this I will write, hopefully building on the momentum I developed yesterday.

Going for red blooms today.

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