Saturday January 25, 2025

I turned 75 today, which I found rather anti-climatic!

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 1605:

It’s my 75^th birthday, today. Seems like I should be celebrating it as some sort of milestone, going into some deep dive into what being three-quarters of a century old means. Instead, my gift to myself today is to thank all of you for hanging in with me as I ramble through my days, keep this post short and sweet, and make myself a nice cup of hot chocolate.

I really made progress doing research in the local newspapers yesterday, and I might be able to finish this first pass through today. Really the best way for me to spend the day.

Not sure much of what I found will be relevant, but I did have fun going down a rabbit hole looking at the nefarious antics of the Chief Clerk working for the Quartermaster for the military stationed at the Presidio (don’t ask how I stumbled on this story). He forged a couple of checks on the US government that totaled nearly $10,000, primarily to cover investment losses with a local stockbroker. He was found out, arrested, stayed in jail for 5 months because he couldn’t post bail. Then some men posted bail for him, but he skipped town before the trial, which kept being postponed.

A local reporter wrote a long, rather sarcastic article, pointing out that the men who posted his bail were employed by the US Survey Department and that once they did so, the man’s father-in-law, who just happened to be a Senator from Nebraska, dropped a resolution he had been pushing in Congress to investigate the US Surveyor Department for corruption. A nice bit of quid-pro-quo. I didn’t take the time to see if the man was ever caught or brought to justice, since it had no bearing on my next book, but it was a nice diverting bit of chicanery, which was quite prevalent in this period.

So time for that hot chocolate, and I will leave you with photos of last night’s sunset and Leeza peacefully sleeping this morning.

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