Wednesday, November 29, 2023: My Favorite Thing #6

Writing Fiction!

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. Currently in the last weeks of the year I am listing some of my favorite things!

Daily Diary, Day 1184: My Favorite Things #6: Writing Fiction

I debated about broadening post this to cover any sort of writing, including these daily posts, but I finally decided that my posts really fit more into the “talking to my friends and family on the phone” favorite thing category, since in many ways I do feel like I am talking to you all as friends in cyberspace as I write them.

Instead, I decided I needed to honor the fact that creating imaginary worlds and writing about the people and events within those imaginary worlds is really is the favorite thing that brings me the most consistent joy in my life right now. I feel so blessed to be doing in my seventies what I wanted to do most of my life.

I knew I wanted to write fiction by the age of 12, and winning a medal for history when I graduated from junior high made it pretty clear what kind of fiction I would like to write. I wrote my first short story, a shameless Georgette Heyer knockoff, when I was 15 for a high school English class, along with some bad poetry in a private notebook. Then in my late 20s, as I worked on my dissertation, which of course was non-fiction, I got in trouble with one of my advisors who felt my description of the women I encountered in my research read too much like fiction.

That was about the time I told myself that at some point I should try writing a historical mystery series that would let me share those women with a wider public than would ever read my dissertation. That was when I came up with the main idea for the protagonist of that series, Annie Fuller, a boarding house keeper who supplemented her income as a pretend clairvoyant.

That was in 1979, but it was 1989, during a brief hiatus from teaching full-time, before I turned that idea into an actual reality and wrote the first draft of what would eventually become Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series..

I loved writing that draft and thoroughly enjoyed the liberation of telling the stories of women who worked in late 19th century San Francisco without having to provide footnotes! That draft immediately got me a well-known New York agent, but unfortunately, the book wasn’t picked up. The rejections were complimentary, but mostly said that the editors weren’t sure there was a strong enough market for what was a relatively new sub-genre, historical mysteries, since they already had one author doing that kind of work, they didn’t feel they needed another.

Despite the fun I had writing that book, since I was offered a full-time job that same year, with a killer teaching load, so I felt I had to defer that pleasure and take the job which would enable me to help support myself and my family. Not that I regret my decades of being a professor in a community college. I didn’t let go of the dream, and I did periodically take up the manuscript every so often and tinker a bit with it, imagining what it would be like to write full-time, thinking that maybe when I retired I would try again.

Finally, in my late fifties, for a variety of reasons, I semi-retired and decided it was time for me to put my dream first.

That’s when I seriously worked on rewriting Maids of Misfortune, investigated ebooks and self-publishing, (having watched my traditionally published friends get so badly burned by the industry that most of them had given up even trying to write and get the next book in their series published. I learned how to format and upload ebooks and print so I could start publishing the Maids of Misfortune, which I did in December 2009. That first year, 2010, was exciting, in that I sold 4500 books, and made more than I would have in an advance from a traditional publisher. I retired completely and and started on a second book in the series, Uneasy Spirits, and I rediscovered how much I simply loved writing fiction, and I haven’t looked back. There was nothing better than filling out the details of the imaginary world of the O’Farrell Street boarding house that was the main setting of the books, watching the relationship between my two main protagonists develop, getting to know the minor characters. And nothing better than knowing that readers enjoyed that imaginary world I was creating.

Now, thirteen years later, after writing twelve novels, six novellas, and nine short stories, my enjoyment has not diminished one iota, and creating both the world of Victorian San Francisco and that of New Eden in the Paradisi Solar system and telling the stories of characters I have come to love, is absolutely my favorite thing.

As a bit of shameless promotion, a reminder that Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, and Between Mountain and Sea, the first book in my Science Fiction series, are permanently free. In addition, for a limited time, the audiobooks editions of the novels in the mystery series are all discounted on Chirp.

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