Monday May 26, 2025

Short stuff and more 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 1727

Edgar and friends update: Still no reappearance yet of any of the daddy long legs.

Looking back at the past two weekends, it’s becoming clear that if I am going to continue to use those days to do the thorough cleaning the house deserves, and I am going to schedule phone or zoom calls (or face to face visits—which become more frequent as the weather improves) then I need to lower my expectations about working on my novella.

For example, yesterday morning, after spending nearly three hours, off and on, in cleaning the house, then taking a phone call while doing a 40 minute walk, there wasn’t really much time (nor energy on my part) to do anything in the afternoon but my second scheduled phone call, my second walk, and some journaling.

So, I am going to try new strategy this week, which is to post-pone reading newsletters, newpapers, etc until I’ve gotten my writing and other things on my to-do list done. If that means pushing off to evening or later in the week, so be it. This should free up more time—to both write, but also to still read/listen to fiction for my recreation during the day.

Speaking of recreational reading, this weekend I finished listening to the audiobook version of the Black Moth, Georgette Heyer’s first Regency Romance (although it was set in a slightly earlier period, so wasn’t strictly a Regency). As with the science fiction I am reading, this fulfills my current interest in checking out the earlier works of some of my favorite authors.

While this book had a lot of the themes and characters that would become prominent in Heyer’s books, the book as a whole wasn’t nearly as good as her subsequent novels. There were too many point-of-view characters, the title character (the Black Moth) was really the villain, and then the two characters who really were the hero and heroine are not active in the beginning of the novel. Taken together, this meant, as a reader, I wasn’t entirely sure who I was supposed to be rooting for at first. I also felt the book lacked the humorous minor characters Heyer developed so well in later books. Anyway, I was glad I was listening to it not reading it, because I really think I might have gotten bored and skimmed if I had been reading. This also explains why, unlike most of her other books, I don’t remember re-reading it multiple times.

I am now listening to a mystery by Dana Stabenow, another one of my favorite authors (whose books I used to read in print as they came out.) Some months ago, I got one of her Kate Shugat Alaska mysteries as a discounted audio book. I really enjoyed it (and it had been so long since I read it that I didn’t remember the plot.) That mystery came right in the middle of her long-running Kate Shugat series, so I decided not to go back to the start (first book was in 1993-and I suspect that is when I read it), but have continued to listen to and enjoy the next books in the series, in order.

However, this week Chirp had the first audiobook edition in her secondary Alaska mystery series discounted, so I got it, and just started listening. Fire and Ice introduces state trooper,

Liam Campbell, as the main protagonist in this much shorter series. My memory was this series came much later, so I was surprised to see that Fire and Ice was first published in 1998, only five years after the beginning of the Kate Shugat series. My memory was also that I didn’t like the Liam Campbell series as much as the Kate Shugat series (which might be why it wasn’t as long running), so I am finding myself looking for ways in which this book differs from her other mysteries. Could be as simple as the fact that the main character is male and at least at this point not as appealing as Kate Shugat as the main character!

However, I don’t know if it has occurred to any of you, but I seem to be rationalizing rereading or listening again to all these old favorite authors, instead of just writing my own stories, by telling myself that this is giving me insight into the writing craft (smile.)

However, my daughter has been urging me to try a couple of her favorite fantasy epic series she loves (since Lord of the Rings…which I used to reread every year faithfully for at least a decade) and some early Andre Norton, I am afraid straight fantasy has never kept my interest. But I will soon give some of these books and stories a try…as a break from my current re-visiting of old favorites.

But first, more flowers.

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