Sunday, April 6, 2025: Ta da! List

Lots to celebrate!

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 1677:

It has been about a month since I last did a Tada! List Post, and I felt it was high time to do a little more celebration.

So, my first celebration is not for something I accomplished, but that the Hands Off protests that happened yesterday were so successful. I spent much of yesterday and this morning scrolling through the various photos and videos from people posting on FB and Bluesky. This has considerably lifted my spirits…as did all the responses to my Friday post.

What impressed me most was the sheer number and variety of places that had protests--small rural towns, big cities, suburbs, and throughout blue and red states. Then there were the signs. Just as every aspect of our democracy and economic, social, and political structures are being attacked, the signs demonstrated that people understood this isn’t a single issue problem that is affecting just one group, and that divisions over priorities or even solutions aren’t going to serve us. Instead, the message of all those different signs in all these different places was the importance of coming together to resist in a situation where all the normal methods of getting one’s voices heard (working through congress, the courts, etc) are being illegally blocked.

And the humor of those signs! Not because people are taking the danger lightly, but because in some cases black humor is the only sane response.

Here are a few of my favorites that I culled from various social media sources.

On a celebratory personal note, this past month I have been able to slowly and sensibly work on building up my stamina. I am being much more careful than in the past to not push walking for more than 30 minutes at a time and not feeling I have to reach the full 60 minutes of walking every single day. As a result, there have been no major arthritis flare-ups, and my bursitis, while not completely gone, is in good enough shape that I stopped wearing the compression sleeve a couple of days ago.

And perhaps the greatest reason for personal celebration is that I have finally started writing the short story Mr. Wong to the Rescue. The research and working on the story outline is paying off. Even if I have at most an hour or two to write a day, I have been able to average 571 words a day, which is a little over my daily target. I now have 4193 total words in the story, and this does suggest that this short story might creep into novella length. (Smile.)

What are you celebrating today? I would love to hear if any of you went to one of the protests, and how you felt by having gone.

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