Wednesday, April 30, 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 1701:

I am having trouble accepting the idea this is the last day in April. This month went by so fast. At the beginning of the month, I had just started writing Mr. Wong to the Rescue, and now the draft is at 15,772 words long (15,000 words is where I start to call a short story a novella!) This means that for the month, I have averaged over 500 words a day—my writing goal. The average would have been much higher if I excluded those days I didn’t write at all in the count.

So, maybe that’s why I unconsciously felt the need for a break in my writing yesterday. For some reason, all day I felt draggy. I’d slept ok, and I did get in two 30-minute walks, the first time I got back up to 60 minutes of walking a day since last Friday. I also did all the other things on my to-do list: cleaning, making an appointment with eye doctor, paying a bill, and an hour-long zoom call with someone.

But I did all of this slowly, without much zip. So, I didn’t try to work on the novella. Instead, I caught up on substack newsletters and made some progress on the CJ Cherryh book I started a couple of days ago. Sort of the flip of the day before when I wrote, but didn’t read.

Today, I’ve had another good night’s sleep and I have already had yoga, cleaned, and taken my first walk. Now to see if I am ready to get back to writing.

But first, I took a slightly different route today, and these three bushes (with shots of single blossoms on each) were so incredible that I decided to put all three in the post today!

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