Wednesday, January 8, 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 1589:

As someone pointed out to me yesterday, I have been saying it is 2024 in my posts, a year I don’t particularly want to linger in!! So, I have dutifully gone back and updated my posts. Now, its time to move forward as gracefully as I can. Not an easy task in the midst of all the disturbing news about LA wildfires, political craziness, and the continued deterioration of social media. I am so glad I got so many of the people who followed me on Facebook to shift over to follow me here in this substack newsletter, and I hope I can get the rest to move over during this next month.

Here, where I live near the coast in San Diego, it is sunny, going to go up into the low 70s, but there is little wind, not even enough to stir our chimes. Evidently, at least for now, the predicted Santa Ana winds are north of us.

In the good news department, today I have a BookBub featured deal on Between Mountain and Sea, and I already have seen over 3000 copies downloaded on Kindle, with bumps in sales of the rest of the books in the Caelestis series.

In addition, I think the elbow is improving. The only way I can tell is that the part of the elbow that is stretched tight (no wrinkles) seems to be contracting a tiny bit each day. That is still leaving the swelling covering a large part of the elbow, and none of the bony elbow itself (which is very prominent on my left arm) is visible at all. Consequently, I am still trying to take it easy, without freezing up from sitting too much. I cleaned and took two short 15 minute walks yesterday, and today I have done yoga, one 15 minute cleaning session upstairs, and I will do a longer cleaning session downstairs in a bit, with I hope time to walk 15 minutes before lunch.

Yesterday, I also finished reading a major chapter in my research book and began to think about the personal arcs for specific characters I want to cover in the book. Still no clear plot however.

Whoops, since I started drafting this post, the wind has picked up a little. Hoping it stays reasonably calm. Meanwhile, here is a rose that bloomed during the recent sunny days.

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