Weekly Writing Intentions: July 22, 2023

Daily Diary, Day 1056:

Hi, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series.

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I felt quite good about how I met my goals for this week! I actually averaged slightly more than 90 minutes of exercise a day, and I had at least a 20 minute walk every single day. I also got in a few ten-minute physical therapy sessions. My intention is to maintain this pace and mix of cleaning and walking, with the goal to have at least 5 days where I get in 60 minutes of walking, and to do the PT every day.

This past week, I also finished the first draft of Dandy and the Dognappers, which at over 25,000 words is definitely now the length of a novella. The whole story is now available for people to read on substack for a few more day. If you go here, and start with the first scene, there will be links at the end of every scene to lead you to the next one, on through to the end.

I also made very good progress on the first edit, with only two more scenes (now chapters) to edit, which I should be able to complete today.

So, for the coming week my intentions include contacting possible beta readers and sending the this draft of the novella out to them to read. Tomorrow, I will also put together what I need (categories, key words, product description) in order to put the book up as a pre-order, which means it will be available as an ebook with multiple retailers on August 25.

If all goes well, on this Monday I will delete the story on substack and then put up the pre-order. This will give me a couple of weeks to get feed-back from my beta readers, do any rewriting necessary, then get the book to the proof-reader. I also would like to do some polling on facebook and substack to see how people have liked this experiment of me putting one of my novella’s up as I went along writing it.

This coming week there will are the usual phone calls, zoom meeting, etc, and a friend is coming over for a face-to face visit.

Here is a cute garden ornament I saw on my morning walk today. I do have to be careful, when I see something that makes me smile, I am tempted to go look on line for it. One of the unexpected aspects of hitting my senior years is discovering I had a previously unknown appreciation of lawn ornaments!