Sunday, December 17, 2023: Ta Da! List

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 1202:

Again, lots of gratitude for how you all have responded to the Ta Da! posts, and this week I got another paid subscriber, which is always simply amazing. As a reminder, everything I post will continue to be free for everyone, but those who upgrade to paid subscriber are helping me pay for some of the marketing that helps me free up writing time both in my fiction and in this newsletter.

So, in addition to this new paid subscriber, this week I am celebrating three other things.

The first is simple. I am celebrating the positive effect that shifting to these Ta da! posts has had on my attitude.

This week I really noticed that I was more relaxed about the amount of exercise I had done and the amount of writing I accomplished in any one day. Some days I got in way more than my goal of 90 minutes a day, some a little less. And I had a similar pattern my writing. There were some days where I didn’t get anything written on the novel, other days where I got well over the 500 a day goal I always hope for.

The difference was that, instead of feeling as if I needed to explain to myself or to you for those days when I skipped a walk or didn’t even open the manuscript, I accepted that was life and felt good for what I had accomplished. Looking at my numbers briefly this morning, it also appears that the actual numbers for either didn’t go down (and may have actually gone up), but the point is my attitude improved. I also slept 7-8 hours a night all week. I have no idea if this is related to being more relaxed, or coincidental, but it certainly was nice.

A second thing I want to celebrate are two of the phone calls I had this week that left me feeling particularly pleased. One was from a young relative (about 40 years younger than me) who has an extremely difficult job and wanted to vent a bit. It is my impression (which could be wrong) that their extended family isn’t that interested in hearing about their work—or they feel shy about sharing. For some reason since we connected (first on facebook) about four years ago, they have started calling me once every month or so. I do think that there is a bit of the “checking to see if the older relative is ok” to the calls because they are just that sort of kind and over-responsible person, that but I think it is also because I am so obviously interested in what they have to share.

The second call was with a friend who has been going through very difficult medical issues, and I was so delighted to hear that, while the objective problem and symptoms haven’t changed, that they are much more at peace and probably taking better emotional care of themselves.

The third thing I am going to celebrate is how much I have thoroughly enjoyed doing the Favorite Things posts. Most were redone ones from earlier posts, but this simply meant that as I reread them and tweaked them to reflect the past year, I found myself smiling, hoping that you all felt the same way. I also found a couple of old posts on doing research that I look forward to also tweaking and getting up after I finish the Favorite Things posts.

A postscript: I just had to share that this morning as I get ready to publish this post my husband is making the last of the holiday goodies that we will give out to people. He’s made fudge, truffles, snowballs, and today is a special, super rich sugar cookie. He is also listening to a old compilation of 1950s rock and roll that he always listens to when he makes these goodies. While I can’t eat the goodies, the smell is wonderful (the poor man no longer has any sense of smell-so he had to have me smell the anise that goes into the cookies to make sure it was still good), and it's been fun listening to the music. A good reason to celebrate!

If you enjoy my daily posts and would like to subscribe for free or become a patron (where you will get the pleasure of giving me the resources to spend more time writing and less time marketing) click the little button below. In addition, please do click on the heart so I know you’ve been to visit and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments! Thanks!