Saturday, March 8, 2025,

Some inspiration on the new short story I'm writing.

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 1648:

We are having a few days of sun, still chilly temperatures, but I can see the effect of rain then sun on the greening of the grass and the buds peeking here and there. In short it’s been lovely walking weather.

Yesterday, I did my regular cleaning, wrote the long post I put up yesterday, had one phone call, and during my first walk of the day, actually had a bit of a break-through on the short story.

I was listening to a favorite pod cast, called Shedunnit that is all about Golden Age mysteries (think Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, etc). While the topics concentrate on mysteries written between WWI and WWII in Great Britain, the podcast often looks at precursors like Sherlock Holmes, as well as contemporary mysteries that seem to follow in the traditional style. If you like mysteries, or podcasts, do give this a try.

Anyway, the topic I was listening to yesterday was about short stories, and what made a mystery short story work. As I listened, wondering if my stories fit the criteria they were listing for successful mystery short stories, I suddenly realized that the current story I was working on about Mr. Wong didn’t really have a mystery. It had a problem to be figured out, but not a mystery to be solved. This struck me as possibly the reason I was having trouble getting started on the story. Instantly I knew what the mystery could be, whipped out my phone and dictated my idea.

When I got home, I started to rethink some of my ideas about scenes to write and did some more research to fit my new idea, but I am feeling quite optimistic that this could be the break-through I needed to motivate me to get cracking on this story today.

Meanwhile, I need to get ready for a zoom call this morning, and here are a couple of those signs of spring I mentioned earlier.

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