Saturday, June 21, 2025

Short stuff and Edgar's Friends

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 1753:

Edgar’s friends: No more sightings of Miss Tiny, the Daddy Long Legs from upstairs, who I had hoped would find a safe place behind the toilet. However, I was glad this morning to see the teeny-tiny Daddy Long Legs (that had grown during the five days I had observed her on her web by the magazine rack in the downstairs bathroom.) She had reappeared in one of the favorite places for Edgar and his friends, near the corner by the ceiling high above the sink counter. I have decided to call her Miss Teeny. Hope she finds something to eat.

Yesterday, was the longest day of the year, and since it had gotten sunny by mid-morning, and stayed that way, we really did feel the effect of that long day, since it had barely gotten dark before we started thinking about going to bed.

I am puzzling out some changes I want to make to the structure of the novella, which is what I concentrated on yesterday afternoon. Consequently, I went back and started to do a new barebones outline, to see where I need to add, perhaps subtract information. Not satisfied I’ve solved the problem yet, but hope to make progress this weekend. Otherwise, the yesterday was very normal, two walks by lunch time, so I was up to my sixty minutes total, and that was on top of 40 minutes cleaning. My had had been to do pilates before dinner, but since I had already exceeded two hours up on my feet during the day, I decided that I should spend that 20 minutes reading before dinner!

I had just finished the third book in the Blue Ant trilogy, which I thoroughly enjoyed, so I went right on to Gibson’s final trilogy (which at this point is only two books) called the Jackpot series. This is the series that had a tv show made of this first book I am reading, Peripheral. I actually did enjoy that adaptation, and was sorry when the sequel was canceled because of delays from the Hollywood writers’ strike.

Today, I’ve had to delay my first walk because it took over an hour to complete my regular Saturday cleaning, and I have a 9 am zoom call. However, after that call, I should be able to get in a 40-minute walk, with my second walk before dinner. Then I will go back to working on the new outline, followed by an early lunch, so I can participate in another zoom co-writing session, and maybe start to write some of those new scenes.

My personal rose bush just popped out a bloom, went from tight bud to full-blown blossom in 24 hours! That’s what these sunny days will do. Oh, and here is a photo of that hybrid rose a day later, where you can now see clearly there are three of the yellow-orangey blossoms—which started to turn more pink as they got bigger, grouped around the dark pink in the middle.

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