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.
Daily Diary, Day 1257:
Yesterday continued to be changeable, with wind, sun, clouds, and one rain shower. I did get in my 30-minute walk in the morning (see first photo) but ten minutes after I got home it started to rain pretty heavily. My husband who was out giving our dog her second and long walk, got caught about half-way into the walk, but fortunately he was able to stand under the eaves of the local grocery store and stay dry. The second photo is looking out over the canyon while it was raining, and it except for the fact that it looks a bit hazy, with the blue sky, you wouldn’t realize it was raining at all. The third photo, taken a second later, shows the rain pelting the upper deck floor. Yay, weather.
I wish I could say I made a lot of progress on the writing yesterday, but it was one of those days where it felt like I was going backward. I was down about 300 words at one point, and only in the last hour of writing made any headway, ending the day with 118 new words. The problem was I was starting a chapter with a character that had been introduced in the last book, and mentioned a few times in this one, but now she was actually going to come on stage with a speaking role. When I went back and searched for her in the earlier book, and in this draft, I found both redundancies and continuity issues, so there was a lot of cleaning up I needed to do.
To complicate matters, this character named, Claire Chandler, and her young cousin, Talley, who I had introduced at the same time, were characters who had been created by two different authors. As a reminder, this series is set in a shared world that I and a number of other authors created, called the Paradisi Chronicles. Claire was created by Sarah Woodbury for her novel, Erase Me Not, which was set in New Eden in 200 AA (or 34 years later than my series.) Her cousin, Natalia (Talley) Chandler, was created by David Bruns in his short story, A Touch of Deceit that is in the Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi anthology. This story was set eighteen years earlier than my time frame.
I thought it would be fun to use these two characters in a very minor fashion in my own books, hoping this would encourage readers to go on and read these other two works. But it also meant I needed to be careful of how I treated them in my own work.
Today, I do hope to make more forward progress. I do have one scheduled phone call after lunch, but that shouldn’t keep me from getting at least an hour or so writing time this morning, and maybe another hour or two this afternoon. I’ve already spent nearly an hour and a half getting the upstairs cleaned, and I am about to take my morning walk (it is very sunny today.) But I will leave you with two more incredible shots of clouds from my walk yesterday afternoon, and a photo of the amaryllis, which has now fully bloomed.
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So lovely to see your Amarylis has fully bloomed!
Wonderful! I admire your perseverance...yup down some words but you hung in there! Congrats!! Thank you for sharing the flowers! I love the sun in the clouds.