Thursday, May 15, 2025

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 1716:

I hope that people enjoyed yesterday’s post into how careful an author needs to be to use words that give you a sense of the world you are building (whether in the past, present, or future) without being anachronistic or bringing the reader out of that world. As I finish the first draft of Mr. Wong to the Rescue, I plan on writing more of these sorts of posts about the writing/research process in relation to this novella.

As I mentioned yesterday morning, I continued to rest my arm by not writing (beyond working on yesterday’s post), but I did my two walks, and cleaned. Today, I will give writing, at least in short bursts, a try. Since I have my noon zoom meeting, I probably will need to do my second walk after that, rather than before, but I should be able to write a little in both the morning and afternoon.

There has also been a change in pricing of print books by Amazon, which will require me to go in and change the prices of a few books—and that will take up some time.

Yesterday, I moved on to reading Mona Lisa Overdrive, the third Gibson novel in his Sprawl trilogy. Reading these first books so close together has made his growing sophistication between the first, published in 1984 and this third, in 1988, very visible. Needless to say, it is making reading them all that much more enjoyable—as I see him developing themes that he will continue to carry through. In the first two books the main pov (point of view) characters were male, in this one, there are several female pov characters as well, which I am enjoying. (This reminds me that I should write about my decision in Maids of Misfortune to write both Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson as pov characters. Maybe tomorrow!)

Anyway, yesterday was quite sunny, but breezy, and I really enjoyed sitting and reading (and resting arm) while listening to the wind chimes and looking out occasionally at the birds at the bird feeder and flitting around the olive tree out the front window. And I was completely delighted when I saw two red headed woodpeckers (I think they were Acorn Woodpeckers) in that olive tree. A very unusual sighting.

Then of course there were more roses on my walks.

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