Thursday, June 5, 2025

Edgar and TV show musings.

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 1737:

Edgar and Friends Report: Yesterday the drama continued, with both spiders staying in the corner, but the new, lighter colored one ended up climbing up the wall, with Edgar re-installing himself in his preferred corner between the magazine rack and the wall. Nobody ate anyone. This morning, nobody in that corner, but there is a daddy long legs back up in the second most often used place, high up in the right-hand corner between the wall at the back of the sink and the ceiling. I think it is Edgar’s friend because it seems light-colored, but it is hard to see that high up, and lit up by the bathroom lights.

While what people in San Diego call May Gray was spottier than usual this year, with nice breaks with sunshine, we are definitely now in the middle of a spell of June gloom. Today this meant that the morning low clouds were so dense that they left the streets wet, and my husband’s coat shoulders were wet as well from his first walk of the dog. He said it was too wet for mist, but too light for rain, and in my opinion that makes misty drizzle (or as I affectionately call it, mizzle—which I just looked up and found is a real word—most popular use in the 19^th century.

This is my noon zoom meeting day, with a meeting afterwards. So will try to get in a longer walk first thing, in case I run out of time before I need to get ready for that noon meeting. Yesterday, I broke my walks into three 20 minutes walks, and pushed to walk faster for the first two. I also did the co-writing zoom meeting and then wrote again in the afternoon to get 500 words written. Goal is to try to get that much done today again.

After several weeks of starting new TV shows, usually police procedurals, where we don’t make it past first episode (or sometimes don’t even make it to the end of episode.) we have settled down to having 3 shows we can alternate. One of the failures was Dept Q. It was supposed to be about cold cases (for example like Unforgotten), but unlike Unforgottenwhere the person had been murdered years earlier (similar to being murdered off screen), in Dept Q, we were really seeing clips of a captured person who was missing. Too creepy and grim. Seems like so many of the shows we have started watching and then stopped were either serial killers, and/or young people who are missing. And the main characters all seemed to have too much dark baggage or difficult romantic relationships to provide any lightness to the grimness.

In short too much noir, not enough humor. But I do like even the lighter toned ones to have characters I start to care about. One of the reasons we are sort of neutral about shows like Agatha Raisin, Harry Wild (we have watched, but didn’t watch all the seasons, and have no desire to rewatch.) is we never really cared all that much about the main character. On the other hand, we like Annika, Astrid, Chelsea Detective, Whistable Pearl, Brokenwood, Shetland, because we do care about the main characters, including members of their team.

And then there is Vera. Which in my mind was just right mixture of decent mysteries, touching on real social issues, but humor and characters we cared about. But it has ended, and we have rewatched all the seasons too recently to rewatch again…yet.

But a couple of nights ago, as we were casting around for something to add to our rotation (currently Life on Mars the main other long series we are rewatching), my husband remembered The Closer (Kyra Sedgwick in role as Brenda, head of a LA special crimes unit.) We’ve now watched three episodes and have been really been enjoying.

And it occurred to me it did have some of the same elements I liked in Vera. They have very quirky, but likeable main characters. On the surface they seem different—Vera is aging, single, frumpy, grumpy—while Kyra’s (Brenda) character is young, sexy--they are both rather difficult people to deal with—at least at first—but they are also brilliant, extremely good at their jobs, and the people who work for them eventually have grudging affection for them. And both like sweets—smile. And their teams are filled with interesting characters, that are fun to get to know and watch. And best of all, there is just the right mix of interesting crimes, tension, and humor.

So we think we may have our Vera substitute for now—with seven seasons to stream.

More roses, although more and more of the bushes are either filled with brown and falling-apart blooms, or have been pruned back to a third their size. Here’s one with drops from yesterday morning’s mizzle!

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