Sunday, October 6, 2024: Tada! 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.

In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.

Daily Diary, Day 1495

Finished First draft:

Two weeks ago, I’d written in my Tada! Post that I finally finished reading the In Ddaera’s Embracemanuscript I’d had to leave unfinished when I started my “vacation” to deal with the double whammy of a bathroom remodel and the injury to my hands. Today, I get to celebrate that I will have finished this first draft by the end of today.

I may do a little editing of these last chapters over the next few days, but the goal is to be able to set the manuscript aside for a week or so before I begin the next process of rereading and editing the entire manuscript over a couple of days. I hope to have that done by October 25, at which point I start the next stages of sending the manuscript to beta readers, responding to their feedback, sending the revised manuscript to be go through a kind of copy edit, making last tweaks based on that, and then I will send to the professional proof reader I always use. Then…the novel will be ready to publish. But for today, I am celebrating the fact that in a few paragraphs, I will write The end.

Surgery scheduled:

I now have a surgery date for my hand, about six weeks away. If all goes smoothly with the manuscript, in those six weeks I should be far enough along (and maybe have even completed) all the stages I listed above. That means even if I need to rest the hand for awhile after surgery,  I should still be able to publish before the first of the year.

My health is holding steady:

I have been able to maintain my daily routine in terms of eating, exercising, soaking my eyes. As a result, my blood sugar has remained good, the one stye I developed in the past couple of months I was able to knock back with only soaks, I am about to get my flu and covid vaccines and have made it through another year without any viruses, and I have passed all the yearly preventative tests with flying colors. Except for the hands, I would say that these past two months are the first two months in a row since last February that I haven’t had some set back in terms of my overall health. Not a coincidence that during those two months is when my writing picked up, and a definite reason to celebrate

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Brief check-in: Another longer Sunday cleaning, ordered groceries, took my first walk, wrote this post, will have a phone call late afternoon, unpacked the groceries, and now it is past 11, and in an hour it is time for my second walk, so let’s see if I can get to The end before or after lunch. Here is a rose bush that is going to town!

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