Wednesday May 28, 2025
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 1729:
Yesterday morning was lovely. Regular cleaning, some laundry, finishing and posting my daily newsletter, then off for my first walk. It was still cloudy, and I found a fun podcast to listen too, so 40 minutes flew by. Then when I got back, my left neck and shoulder were a little sore. A chronic problem for me, I am assuming because I have mild scoliosis (which about every ten years some doctor or PT person remarks on, but has never suggested I do anything about.) I think it first came up when as a freshman in college I took what was called “body mechanics,” they did a posture screening, where we had to strip down into our underwear, and I think they took a photograph and watched us walk across the floor. Ick! There is a whole literature about this practice which was rather sexist, since at least by the 1960s it targeted women.
Anyway. I had recently paid for a substack newsletter called Yoga for Tired People, mostly to check out the archive of sessions, and I did a 10 minute session on neck and shoulders that helped. I may need to do this every day for awhile to get it calmed down a bit—or just assume that for some reason it is the 40 minutes versus the 30 minutes that is causing it.
I then worked on doing a more detailed outline of the next chapters of my novella, had my scheduled phone meeting, and took my second walk. For the second walk, the sun was out, with a lovely breeze, and I was pleased I was able to ramp up my walking speed (which I could tell by how far I went.) After doing one additional minute up a fairly steep incline at the bottom of our street, I was even a tiny winded—which means I had actually walked fast enough to get my heart pumping. Yipee!
I did get my more than 500 words written during the afternoon, plus recreational reading, and catching up on substack newsletters after dinner, and there was a new Brokenwood episode in the evening. Pretty perfect day.
Today, I’ve completed yoga in the morning, done my cleaning, I will then post this, pay some bills, and go out for my first walk. Since I should have, at most one phone call today, I hope to have another productive writing day, today!
Some trees still in bloom, the jacaranda (purple flowers) are just starting so I will try to get photos when they are in full bloom. Also a few cacti seem to be at least promising some blooms.
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And back in 1950. Women could not get a credit card or own property !
The "posture" thing was the remnants of a eugenics program intended to make sure that the women attending "elite" colleges, who would presumably marry the elite men and become elite mothers, were good physical specimens. My mom and her sister (Oberlin '52 and '54) were required to do this, and of course, it was rampant at all the women's colleges like Vassar, Radcliffe, Wellesley, Smith, etc. I had thought it was only women's colleges till my mom told me they did it at Oberlin too.