Wednesday February 5, 2025

Today's daily diversion! Clouds

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 1617:

This morning has been very busy, with first yoga, then off to the dentist for a cleaning, and now I want to get this up before I take a phone call, followed almost immediately by another phone call.

However, I do hope that I will have some time to continue to work after lunch, because I felt quite good about what I accomplished yesterday.

For about a week, off and on, I had been looking into a plot for a short story for Mr. Wong. I had an idea about a possible problem for him to solve, but there was one piece of information about California law that I needed before I could figure out if my idea would work. I kept reading articles, excerpt of books and master theses, and Wikipedia articles (and an occasional AI summary) and all I was getting was the same material, over and over, often looking like everyone was quoting each other.

But none of this research gave me the answer to my question. Until yesterday morning when my dogged approach paid off. Even better, what I discovered meant my possible plot device would actually work. I can’t be more specific at this point because I don’t want to gove any spoilers, but needless to say I felt triumphant!

I will let that idea germinate while I turn back to working on the full-length novel this afternoon.

The weather for the next week seems to be a mix of fog, clouds, sun, and slight chance of rain, but never very warm, although we have some sun with the mixed clouds today. But I rather like the variety.

Here is a couple of photos I took yesterday afternoon in the brief period of sunshine.

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