Wednesday, June 25, 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 1757:

Edgar’s friends: Miss Teeny still in her corner in downstairs bathroom!

Yesterday was another busy day, and pretty much followed in the order I thought it would (except for one unscheduled phone call.) I love when a day goes generally as planned. I did get in my two walks before lunch, I even did a little chair Pilates and yoga before dinner. I did get a little writing done, and I even got caught up on my substack reading before time to watch TV, where we watched another episode of Patience and of The Closer (it is on Peacock, which we just subscribed to for this series, so there is a motivation for binging so we can unsubscribe.)

One amusing thing did happen yesterday. As you may remember, one of my strategies of taking my time when eating my lunch salad is to watch some sort of home and garden sort of show…preferably one that is 20 minutes--just about how long it takes me to slowly eat my salad (lots of crunchy stuff to chew.) Some time ago we made some sort of shift in what we pay for, getting rid of a lot of channels we never or seldom watch, and that included getting rid of the HGTV channel. But I found that MAX (now once again shifting to HBO-MAX) had some seasons of my favorite, House Hunters International. However, I have finished watching the 2 seasons available on that channel, so went looking to see if it was anywhere else. I found a couple of seasons on Hulu, and watched an episode yesterday over lunch.

Yesterday evening, as my husband was channel surfing to see if there was something new for us to watch over dinner, he found himself on the Hulu category “TV for you.” I assume this is some AI deciding what we would like to watch based on what other shows we have watched. This is the amusing part, because he suddenly said, “Do you know they have a bunch of home improvement shows on Hulu?” Turns out watching that one show had populated that category with at least 20 different home or garden related shows, most of which I had never heard. Shows—like Hideous Houses, and Extreme Views. So today I may spend a few minutes checking some of them out, they might turn out to be a hoot as lunch time fare!

This morning has been both busy and productive. I had a co-writing zoom meeting available at 6:30 AM (the person running it is an east coast person.) This meant that before I had even finished my morning breakfast, it was time to sign on and start writing. It went for 2 hours, with some breaks and I did some editing and actually got over 230 new words written. After done usual clean, start laundry, I now I need to write and publish this post, and go for my first walk. I may or may not have a phone call today, but otherwise I hope to get at least another writing session in—and maybe actually reach my first goal of 500 words on the novella in some time.

Here are some more of these roses that I thought at first were hybrids in that they have two different colors, but I wonder if they may actually simply be pink/red blossoms that have been bleached by the sun? Anyway, enjoy!

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