Monday May 19, 2025

Short stuff plus author/reader musings.

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 1720:

I felt I organized this past weekend well. Good balance, despite or maybe because of the fact that weekends is when I do extra cleaning. Saturday was particularly productive. Since cleaning the upstairs took nearly an hour, I decided to make my first walk 20 minutes to make sure I wasn’t overstressing my feet. Eventually I took two more walks, one before lunch, one before dinner, so I still got my 60 minutes total. Because my cleaning of the downstairs is even longer…yesterday and hour and a half…I did the same thing on Sunday. Again, 3 walks, each shorter, but the total of 60.

Writing on Saturday really went well, doing it as part of a zoom meeting with about 8 other authors, so that I had completed 640 words before lunch. This let me work on my first draft of my Sunday post, plus enjoy finishing the third book in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy.

I really enjoyed how he wove in characters from the first two books, which meant that by the end of this thrid book, I felt satisfying closure. Also, I appreciated that he had provided in this third book three interesting female pov (point of view) characters, and only one male pov character, who was very different from the male characters from the first two books. In short, six years into his writing career, Gibson was definitely becoming more and more skilled at character development. However, there were still these odd touches where in the 80s, his fear future still had no cell phones, personal computers, and lots of references to faxes!!!

Most of Sunday morning was taken up with cleaning, walking, and by the afternoon, I just didn’t feel like writing on the novel, so I didn’t. Did have one short phone call. Also started on this post. This morning I won’t have much time for writing (with cleaning, at least one 30 minute walk, Rio coming over and a scheduled zoom phone call), but I am committed to trying to write between 2 and 4 this afternoon. See what I can accomplish.

Meanwhile, we finished watching the 4-episode PBS show Miss Austen last night, which is a semi-fictional treatment of Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra, who reportedly destroyed most of Jane Austen’s voluminous correspondence. This plot provided a glimpse of the family dynamics, and a reasonable explanation for why Cassandra destroyed these letters. I really enjoyed this, and I strongly recommend checking it out.

And today is sunny, going to be warm and supposed to be the start of a warm spell, so I am washing lighter quilt to put on the bed, anticipating we are really heading into summer weather.

But first some roses that had drops left-over from the light rainfall we had Friday night.

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