Weekly Writing Intentions: July 29, 2023

Daily Diary, 1063:

I did a good job of meeting my goals this week. In fact, I may have overdone the exercise. I noticed there were a couple of days when I was experiencing some of the back pain of the past, and I just added up my total of minutes spent a day either cleaning or walking, and discovered I averaged over two hours of exercise a day, walking all seven days. No wonder my body was complaining, this meant I was averaging a good half-hour more exercise a day than I had been. So, maybe I need to ease up a bit!

As for the tasks associated with writing and publishing, I also did well. I finished my first edit of Dandy and the Dognappers and sent this off to my beta readers. I have already gotten responses from four of them, and yesterday I started making the simple changes in terms of correcting typos. I also set the book up as a pre-order on the major retailers (to go live August 25.) Subsequently this mean starting the marketing part of the process, mentioning here and updating the buy page on my website and providing links for the newsletter I sent out on Thursday.

While not all these retailers let me know how many books have been pre-ordered, on Kindle as of this morning, 98 books have been pre-ordered. 

I also wrote a recommendation post for Thursday, and wrote a draft for a post next Tuesday on why my mystery series can be called a cozy mystery. I also started the tedious process of updating the backmatter for all my books to show the new novella’s buy link, and then uploading this to retailers.

As for my goals this coming week, I need to be a little more mindful about exercise, not over-doing it, (this morning I did only 30 minutes) and  maybe not feel I need to walk every day.

I should get all my feedback from beta readers by Monday, so I will then spend the next few days rewriting, so that I can then send on to the person who copy edits my manuscript by the end of the week. I will also continue to update and upload the rest of my mystery books. In addition to regular phone calls, zoom meetings, a friend is coming to visit, and I have a doctor’s appointment on Friday. But neither should throw my schedule off by too much.

Finally, I hope to get back into working on book five of the Caelestis series, Where the Glass Flowers Grow, by starting to work out main plot points this week.

As usual, all this should keep me out of trouble!

As with my recommendations post, I am looking for a graphic that will tell people this is the weekly writing intentions post, so this is what I am going to try out.

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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