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 1316:
First off, we finally got the start date for our bathroom remodels (doing the two full baths upstairs, and the powder room downstairs.) This now gives us three weeks to get ready, which includes a major purge of stuff. We are concentrating mostly in the bathrooms (all those discontinued cough syrup, RX, decorative soaps, ancient sun block, etc) Next comes, the bedroom and hall closets. since at least for the first six weeks we will need to move into a guest room, which means merging our stuff into one closet and one chest of drawers for easy access.
Every day when I clean, I go through something and ruthlessly weed (something I do periodically but probably haven’t done since Covid has changed my behavior in terms of travel and being out in public spaces. So, lots of perfectly good clothes going to good will, such as the summer things I only used for a yearly Florida convention—which I will never attend again—or most of the left-over dressier shirts and skirts from my teaching job—which I retired from 16 years ago! I had already purged most of these, but I am keeping only one of each this this time.
The whole remodel will not be completely finished until August. Going to be interesting to see how my husband and I and our dog survive this kind of disruption for this long a time. Should give me a lot to write about in these posts!
Yesterday I did all my walks, PT, and worked a couple of hours on the first chapter.
I also looked at some sales data and saw that the sell through is going well from the Bookbub featured deal of Maids of Misfortune I did in late March. For example, in the three weeks before the promotion the second book in the series, Uneasy Spirits sold only 10 copies, but in the three weeks after the promotion, it has sold 70 copies! In addition, the promotion of my Entangled Threads audiobook is going well on Chirp.
Today I have a young friend coming over after lunch to sit in the backyard and talk about writing, and then a phone call scheduled, I won’t get any work done in the afternoon, but I have gotten in a couple of hours this morning. Yesterday I still felt as if I am subtracting and adding the same paragraphs, but this morning the editing is going much better.
I still have to keep the splint on, even editing, but the general arthritis flare-up of the past two days is calming down. Multiple joints in both hands twinge if I am not careful, but this feels a bit as if this may be the new normal, which I can live with. Unfortunately, my husband has been feeling under the weather the past few days. Nothing drastic, but still mysterious because he is almost as socially isolated as I am, so it is hard to imagine he picked something up from one of his brief chats on a street corner with a neighbor while walking the dog. But if not? What is going on. He is generally in very good health and I hope whatever it is resolves soon (can’t have two grumpy people in the house). We did both really enjoy rewatching Diner last night, a movie that came out in 1982 and we haven’t seen in decades. Really held up well, I strongly recommend.
Meanwhile, here is a pretty bush from one of my walks, very much in bloom.
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Get well wishes for Jim!
Congratulations on the date! The pictures were wonderful....something about all those fuzzies made me want to sneeze!