Sunday, May 4, 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 1705:

Nearly a month has passed since I last did a Tada! List post, and this felt like a good time to do a celebratory post. Unlike in the last post, today I am primarily focusing on the successes in my own life, but that isn’t to say there haven’t been heartening signs that there is an expanding push back against the current administration, in the streets with protests, in the courts with injunctions, and within institutions that seem to be finally understanding that capitulation isn’t going to work and that there comes a stand when principle does need to rise above profit. If you want a thorough discussion (with multiple links) on this growing resistance, I recommend this newsletter.

On the personal level, however, I am a firm believer that the better job I do to create a balanced and healthy life, the more resources I have to draw on to when friends and family need my help. For example, yesterday I had two unscheduled phone calls from friends, calls that started in tears and ended in laughter. And I was blessed that I could jettison my writing goals and be there for them when they needed me to help lighten their spirits. This, of course is also my hope with my writing, that the stories I put out in the world will help lighten people’s spirits as well.

And to that point, I want to celebrate how much progress I have made in writing Mr. Wong to the Rescue, the short story that is now (no surprise) going to be a novella. As of last night, the story has just under 18,000 words, and so far six chapters. I have achieved this by averaging at least 500 words a day over six days a week. As I have written a couple of times in recent posts, I have used a new tactic of interspersing recreational reading between my writing sprints to help maintain this pace, as well as letting myself take at least one day off from writing a week.

I expect it will take at least another week to finish this first draft, and it will require a good deal of editing before it is ready for me to let any look at it. But I have every confidence it will be published this summer. Of course, my hope is that with the momentum I have gained, I will be able to immediately switch over to finishing the preparation I had been doing for the next full-length novel, and start writing that book in the Fall. All very good reasons to celebrate.

And, I know that I would not have been able to develop that momentum without the improvements in my health. I have worked hard to maintain a good balance in activities for the past three months (cleaning, riding recumbent bike, yoga, and walking), as well as be patient as I built up my stamina. This meant not going from 0 to 60 (in terms of minutes walked) too quickly, which I know in the past often led to new injuries and flare ups of arthritis pain. For example, this month I did a good job of easing back for a few days if I felt I had been pushing the walking too hard, and the result is that I was able to achieve all month weeks like this past one, where I averaged over a hundred minutes of some exercise, with an average of 55 minutes of it walking. Again, definitely something to celebrate.

In addition, I am also celebrating that this week we finalized the arrangements to have our daughter and grandsons come to visit us in August. Because of a combination of my health issues that limit traveling, and their busy lives, I haven’t seen them since before Covid. Needless-to-say, I am really looking forward to August (a very good reason to shoot for having the novella completed by then!

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.

Oh, and I really do need to celebrate how gorgeous the roses in our neighborhood have been.

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