Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Keeping my mind sharp!

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 1554:

Brief check-in: I just finished my early morning pranayama yoga class, and I am getting this posted early because we are soon off to the clinic to get me fitted for splints on both hands. You will get to hear all about how this went tomorrow (even if I have to just dictate the next post!)

However, to celebrate the conclusion of writing my science fiction series, I thought I would discuss how much writing the five novels in the Caelestis series has helped me in my efforts to stay mentally sharp as I age. One of the frequently listed suggestions that all the advice literature gives for how to stave off mental decline with aging is to learn new things. Often the example that is given is learning a new language.

I have always been terrible at languages (I actually took more credit hours in order to pass my language requirement in college than I took in history, my major!) so this example has never resonated with me. However, ten years ago when I got involved with other authors in creating the shared world of the Paradisi Chronicles (check the link here if you want the post on this process), this certainly got me started learning a whole lot more about a range of different scientific subjects.

My historical mystery series frequently sends me off on short forays into research into the past to pin down a detail as I am writing. My rule of thumb for research and historical accuracy is that I try not to make any details up, unless I can’t find any definitive information, one way or the other. For example, if I have learned that there was a company providing electric street lights at a certain date, in a certain city, but I can’t find anything that says there were definitely electric street lights at a certain address, I get to decide what I want to say. Sometimes, I decide to say nothing, if I am worried about being inaccurate.

I discovered in writing the five novels in this science fiction series, the process of doing research has some similarities to my historical research (although in science fiction—by its very nature—even set in the near future—there is a lot more fiction than fact.) For example, when I and my fellow authors started creating this shared Paradisi Chronicles universe we decided that the people who journeyed from Earth to New Eden would bring 3-D printers with them. Consequently, I spent some time researching this technology (which is rapidly evolving) so that I when I mentioned these 3-D printers I was accurate in terms of what the realistic capabilities of this technology would be in the near future.

On the other hand, sometimes I was looking into theoretical, not actual technologies. As we constructed the narrative of space travel for the Paradisi Chronicles, we decided that our space ships were going to use a theoretical method of propulsion, called an Em-drive.

In this case, I wasn’t looking for scientific accuracy, since there is no such thing as an Em-drive beyond this theory…and most probably won’t be. But here the goal was to sound plausible.

And sometimes the science research came first, when something I read caused me to try and figure out how to use what I learned in the story line I am writing.

In all of these cases, not only does this research improve what I write, but it also has encouraged me to be a more informed person (to learn new things) about what is going on in science in general—which indeed stretches my mental capacity.

I am not trained in the sciences, at all. I barely remember my high school biology, and the only science class I took in college was geology, where I met my future husband and, as a result, I remember very little from that class!

However, my husband, as a librarian, is much more of a generalist than I am in subjects—in fact, he is interested in everything. As a result, for decades we have gotten a weekly magazine called Science News and a monthly magazine called Discover and have recently added a weekly UK based magazine called New Scientist, all three filled with articles on the cutting edge of science. Ever since I started writing the Caelestis series, I now read these three magazines from cover to cover, although I don’t promise I understand everything I read.

For example, while I was writing the fourth book in this series, Tides of Acerba, I read an article in Discover Magazine about a pod of sperm whales and a dolphin that cooperated and that prompted me to add a whole new thread to the plot I was working on.

In another example, one of the key threads in this series has been to explain how the native Ddaerans of this newly discovered planet developed psychic abilities, and I came up with the (fictional) explanation from reading I had done read previously about a specific parasite called toxoplasma gondii which some scientists feel are able to affect the behavior of animals and humans. Over the past ten years I have continued to be particularly interested in any articles about parasites, microbes, biomes in both the gut and the brain. And this reading has helped me be more nuanced in the way I have been developing this thread in the series.

While I may not be writing anything new in the Paradisi Chronicles universe for some time, I intend to keep reading my science magazines, and you never know, one of the articles just might inspire a new story. Meanwhile, I will have to just trust that the new research I will begin to do for my next historical mystery novel will keep my mind sharp as well.

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