Tuesday May 27, 2025

Short stuff!

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 1728:

My strategy for weekdays worked well yesterday. In the morning, I got in the regular cleaning, my two walks, writing my newsletter post, and had the usual Monday visit with Rio and his owner, and I still got 260 words written before lunch.

As I have been doing, the first walk was 40 minutes, partly because I do want to push myself as I rebuild my stamina (3 years ago I was walking 60 minutes every morning), and partly because as the days are getting hotter, a shorter 20-minute second walk to complete my 60 minutes of the day is simply easier psychologically.

After lunch, I proceeded to alternate writing and reading, so that by the time I was ready for my 3:30 phone call, I had gotten a total of 609 words written for the day. I even had some time after dinner to get caught up on my newspaper and newsletter reading.

Today, I have a 9:45 am zoom meeting scheduled, but this should make it possible to get at least my two walks in the morning, and maybe some writing done. But no calls in the afternoon, so hope that by the end of the day I’ve reached my 500 word goal.

No daddy long-legs sightings…but I got a glimpse of last week’s little lizard, but he was now missing a tail. Not surprised, since he had been so slow to react to me thumping down the sidewalk, then simply froze. Hope he learned his lesson, he certainly this time scurried into bushes much faster!

And of course, more roses.

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