Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Fire season has started!

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.

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Daily Diary, Day 1394:

An air quality inspector came by yesterday afternoon to check the air purity in the two bathrooms, and this morning somebody from the remodeling company showed up to start working on the hall bathroom. It looks like a different team is assigned to the powder room, and at least this point, nobody from that schedule has shown up. We were curious about the fact that the schedules generally listed different names for the two different projects, so to judge by today, it looks like that’s the way it’s going to work. Actually, the man today wasn’t supposed to start until tomorrow, but we have noticed with the first bathroom there is some flexibility, so we just try to stagger when we take our walks so there is always someone here.

So far today seems to be one of those days with intermittent thumps and bumps and drill sounds, so I am going to try and get this post dictated in a moment that seems to be pretty silent. I’ve done my 30-minute walk this morning and soaked my eye, and I may or may not have a schedule phone call later. Right now, I am sitting up in the chair in our master bedroom, and my husband is outside in the shade with the dog.

I have two small promotions going for Between Mountain and Sea, the free book that starts my science fiction series. So far, the two emails that went out, one from Freebooksy, the other from Fussy Librarian, have garnered 157 downloads of the book so far today. Of course, because it’s free, this won’t generate any direct revenue, but the hope is that at least a significant portion of those people who read this book will enjoy it enough so that they will go on and by subsequent books in the series. The fact that it has 4.5 star average, with 1324 ratings, becomes the social proof the book might be worth giving a try.In addition, this level of downloads has pushed its ranking in the Kindle bookstore up, which means that it ranking at the top in a few categories—for instance it is #3 in Space Colonization and #5 in Space Opera categories, and this increases the chance that someone who is browsing for their next free book will see it.

As for the weather, I was pleased that although it was still in the high 70s yesterday afternoon, I still was able to do a 30 minute walk so this is the second day in a row that I’ve been able to get back to doing my full 60 minutes in just two sessions, and I hope to be able to do that again today. It was a little hazy this morning, but that haze is now gone and there’s still a bit of a breeze coming in the window, but I suspect we will turn the air-conditioning on before noon, which is what we did yesterday.

Yesterday there was a small brush fire up the coast from us, it was under 10 acres, but it took all day to get it completely out. A friend who lives due east said it got smokey enough so she had to go inside. I am afraid after two unusually wet years, shifting to what is probably going to be a hot dry summer, this small fire is a harbinger of what the fire season might be like. San Diego’s response teams are good, but it does put one on alert when you hear sirens, and we get a lot of sirens because from the upstairs of our house we can see the main north-south surface street that connects a lot of the city’s hospitals. Oops, as I write this, I am hearing sirens and our dog is howling. That was a weird coincidence!

Anyway, on a lighter note, with the longer walks, I am going down blocks I haven’t been walking down for a while. As a result, I found a couple more rosebushes to photograph, so here’s two blossoms from the same bush from this morning’s walk.

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