Monday, March 17, 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 1657:

Yesterday was quite pleasant, in part because, in the spirit of making my Sunday’s more relaxed, I had a truncated to-do list. The goal is to see if I can arrange my Sunday’s so this day feels less like my very busy other days of the week. One change has been to try and not have any phone calls scheduled for Sundays.

I did do my usual deep clean of the downstairs, but I followed the pattern I’ve taken up recently of doing the work in 2-3 shorter stints. Because of the rain the past week, there was a fair amount of dried mud here and there, and I gave the countertops and the sinks (which get stained by my tea) a thorough scrub. The result, is that after a thorough dusting, dry and wet mopping, and washing all the various couch covers and dog bedding, by mid-morning everything was nice and sparkly.

But this also meant that if you count being on your feet, bending and stretching to dust and mop, and running up and down the stairs, I felt I’d gotten in a full day of exercise when I was done. So instead of walking before lunch, I was able to spend most of the morning and afternoon reading the doctoral dissertation I posted about discovering when doing my research.

The manuscript so far hasn’t provided any specific details for my own story, in part because the primary analysis of the work was comparing two murder trials set about 40 years after my era. However, in both trials, the accused was a Chinese manservant, and I found the author’s review of the historical literature was quite informative. It felt good to stretch my mind by reading traditional academic language! Not surprisingly, but sadly, what this study is revealing is that, the racism and sexism of the late 19^th century and the 1920s, hasn’t significantly improved and may have actually increased when compared to what is happening today.

We are continuing to watch UK Ghosts at dinner time, and I will be sad when we are done with this series. It gets sweeter and sweeter, and I have really begun to care about all the ghosts. Severance continues to confound, and we watched the first episode of Andor, which I’d read is seen as one of the better Star War’s spin-offs. It is temporarily free on Hulu, in preparation for the new season which is exclusively on Disney+ It’s called hooking your audience.

Today I’ve done my regular weekday cleaning, taken a 20 minute walk, written this post, and in a few minutes Rio the Border Collie is coming to play fetch with my husband, while our dog gets treats from Rio’s owner (smile.) I do have a phone call in the late afternoon, and I hope to get in a longer walk, but otherwise I plan on finishing the dissertation.

Meanwhile, on my walk today I found some clover to photograph, wishing those of you who are Irish a happy St. Patrick’s Day.

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