Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Not enough sleep and detailed timelines, looks like a good day for pu-erh tea!
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.
Daily Diary, Day 1302:
I didn’t get quite enough sleep last night, with a combination of about 45 minutes lost early on, then waking up at 4:30 and not getting back to sleep. But I’ve had a couple nights in a row with eight hours, so I hope I won’t be too draggy today. But definitely a good day for some of my more caffeinated tea.
I’m noticing a definite pattern to my mornings, in that I’m generally able to get all the “maintenance of body and house” tasks done by around 10, and this morning was no exception. I did a little more cleaning than usual because the rain this weekend had mean a good deal of tracked in mud. In addition, it’s supposed to rain even more next weekend, as a result I figured I probably will not want to do the major cleaning that I usually do on weekends, so I hope this holds me until next Tuesday or Wednesday. I’ve done my morning walk, soaked my eye lid, started laundry (the muddy couch covers) and now I’m going to bang out this post.
I’m still dictating the posts and then going back and doing editing. I think this is a really good way of telling how my hand is healing. I would like to get to the point where, after editing my posts, my right hand doesn’t hurt at all. I figured when that happens, I’m ready to start working on the new sections of the book. Meanwhile, I finished reading book 3 in the series, and today I will start reading Tides of Acerba, the book that comes before the book I am writing now.
However, this morning I’m first going to work a little on the timeline of the last two chapters of the book, (hours to cover certain distances, taking into consideration changing tie zones) because that’s what I found myself thinking about it 4:30 in the morning. These are the kind of those details that I know most readers don’t care tht much about (I can say, they arrived in the morning, and most readers won’t notice that given different time zones, that doesn’t make sense.) But I care, and I also know that occasionally there are readers who will in fact be bothered if there’s a major error in basic reality.
So when I finish this post, I will read a little to let my hand rest, and then I will probably spend an hour or so trying to pin down the timelines and time zones so that when I do get to writing those last chapters that’s all worked out. Now that I write this, I wonder if doing this rather nit-picky work will be hard to do if I am sleepy??
Guess its time to make tea, and leave you with this little rock I spied today!
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I like the message on the rock!