Wednesday January 29, 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 1610:

I feel good about both the progress in my writing and in my health that I accomplished yesterday. I worked briefly on a possible plot for a new shorter work featuring Mr. Wong, and then I spent most of the day on sketching out some of the plot threads for the next novel, Etched in Blood.

My husband was asking if we had seen Case Histories, based on the Kate Atkinson, Jackson Brody series. (Acorn just announced it was now carrying the 2 seasons). We had, and I am hoping I can get him to rewatch, even though I have recently been listening to all of these books in order. (I really recommend both the TV series and the books!)

Anyway, one of the key elements of this series is how several different plot lines, which at the start don’t seem at all connected, end up being intertwined, and I realized that I often do something similar with my plot lines. And that is what I was working on yesterday and today, developing enough detail on different crimes and story lines (like characters involved) to see ways they might eventually interconnect.

I also got in three walks yesterday, with a total of 55 minutes. Best I’ve done in weeks, and while my feet were a bit sore at the end of the day…no more than usual!

It was sunny but still quite cold, as it looks to be today. The forecast suggests it will never get up much past 60 degrees over the next few days. Actually nice weather for walking.

I am posting this early today, because I have an appointment this morning to assess how the middle finger in my left hand is doing after nearly 2 months of being immobilized by a splint, 24/7. I took the splint off a week ago, and my personal assessment is that the finger is exactly the same as before the process started, it starts out working fine in the morning, but by the evening the tendon starts to slide off the knuckle and the finger begins to stick slightly. Not nearly as bad as the tendon on the right hand, which is so damaged that the whole finger tilts sharply to the right when ever I move the hand in the slightest, and sometimes I have to manually straighten the finger to get it working. The technician couldn’t get a splint to work on it, so I think that short of surgery, which I don’t plan on doing, I am currently assuming that wearing compression gloves and a commercial splint on the right hand when actively typing, is the new normal. And I can live with that. Elbow swelling is still going down…very slowly, but very steadily.

We watched the movie What Happens Later with Meg Ryan and David Duchovny last night. The movie had interesting echoes of Ryan’s past, and more upbeat rom-com movies. In fact, it was sort of a look at what might have happened if Ryan and Crystal’s characters in When Harry Met Sally had not gotten together. I expect I enjoyed it a good deal more than my husband did, but I am glad we watched it.

I will probably have at least one phone call today, and now that Leeza is no longer tracking in mud from our weekend rain, I will do some sweeping. Otherwise, back to work!

The rain and the sun is starting some of our few flowering trees to blossom, here is one in full bloom.

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