Sunday, June 29, 2025: 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. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1761:

I am celebrating:

A useful tweak to my exercise and writing routines.

I have shifted from simply paying attention to the total words I have written on the novella, or the total minutes I have walked, to a more wholistic accounting…the total minutes I am up doing some sort of exercise or some sort of writing a day.

The reason for that is that it isn’t really the 60 minutes of walking that tend to kick up pain…but the days when on top of that 60 minutes of walking I have also done two hours of cleaning, or an hour and a half of running up and down the stairs for laundry, or the additional twenty minutes of chair Pilates.

Same goes for writing. For example, I only averaged about 300 words a day this week on the novella, but if you count my newsletter posts and journal writing, I averaged just short of a 1000 words a day. And it was the days when I actually did 1200-1300 words that got me into some trouble with my bursitis.

In consequence, this week, as I paid attention to the total exercise and writing I did a day, and as a result I was able to respond immediately by easing up just a little the next day if there was a flare up. I am optimistic about this tweak being sustainable. Definitely a reason to celebrate.

Doing a good job of staying in the present:

I also wanted to celebrate how successful I’ve been this past week in not letting the distressing events in the wider world so disrupt my peace of mind that I can’t find moments of delight and joy each day. This doesn’t mean I don’t stay informed, but that I don’t dwell on what I learn if there is nothing I can do immediately about what is going on.

I thought this I read yesterday from an author whose substack I really enjoy summed up my feeling.

What can happen will happen though and I’m not going to lie: in my wearier moments it all feels pretty demoralizing. I just try not to live there. —Irritable Metis

This is not only important for my own emotional well-being, but it is also important so I have the energy and band-with to be available to my friends and family in all those phone and zoom calls I take each week. Being able write to you all, share Edgar and friends stories and photographs of the nature around me, has a lot to do with how I’ve been able to maintain my equilibrium…so I want to celebrate and thank you all!

What are you celebrating today?

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