Weekly Writing Intentions: Saturday, August 19, 2023

Assessing the past week, predicting the next, and more about the WEATHER!

Daily Diary, Day 1084

As I shared in an earlier post, a doctor’s visit on Monday that was just supposed to be a wellness check turned into a nine-hour ordeal ending in the emergency room with scans to determine I didn’t have a blood clot (I didn’t). But not only did that pretty much wipe out most of Monday, but having not made it to bed until 1:30 am Tuesday morning meant I was pretty groggy most of that day and didn’t even do my usual cleaning, much less walk. Nevertheless, I did average 84 minutes of exercise for the week and walked six of the seven days.

Monday’s excitement also slowed my progress on the plotting for the new science fiction novel, In Ddaera’s Embrace. However, I have generally figured out the timing of events, like when the book opens in relation to the last book, Tides of Acerba, and when it will end. I also have the prologue for the book thoroughly outlined, so that is ready to go when I feel I have done enough outlining for the rest of the book to actually start writing.

I also got the Authors Corner post and the Recommendations post for Tuesday and Thursday done last Sunday, which came in handy, when all my plans went sideways on Monday. I will do the same tomorrow, working on completing another Historical Tidbits, this one the first of several on teaching, and another Authors Corner post about writing novellas.

Then this coming Friday is when Dandy and the Dognappers goes live, so I will probably spend a good deal of the day looking to see how sales are going. This is both the benefit of being self-published (traditional published authors may never really get a clear view of sales, certainly not minute by minute), but of course it can be depressing if sales are slow.

I also expect to make a good deal of progress on plotting. If I sketch out the basic outline for the entire book, then a more detailed one for the first couple of chapters, I should be in a good place to actually start writing.

As for exercise, well that is going to be a big unknown because of the weather. I did get in a walk this morning, but not sure I will get in another until Monday afternoon. In case you haven’t heard, for the first time ever, a Tropic Storm Warning has been issued for Southern California, including San Diego, because the remnants of Hurricane Hilary are headed our way.

It sounds like the heavy rain itself won’t start to hit us until around midnight tonight, with the majority of the wind and rain occurring during the day Sunday, trailing off Monday morning. But the estimates of when, how bad the wind is going to be, and how much rain is going to fall keep changing. From my experience, at least here near the coast, things are never as bad as they predict. But you never know. And if you have been with me and my posts for any length of time, you know that WEATHER, is one of my favorite things, something I wrote about back in December 2022.

I suspect this is because I grew up in western PA, where there were seasons, which meant different weather from the rain, often day after day of it, in the spring, then the heat and thunder clouds (and heat lightening) and humidity (and accompanying mosquitos) of summer, then the crisp cool nights and turning leaves of fall, and the sleet and snow of winter. Therefore, I have a lot of nostalgia for anything that deviates from the generally lovely weather in San Diego, where the temperatures are moderate, the rain is infrequent, and it never snows.

So, given that I can get excited about clouds, an occasional drizzle, a little wind, and the hot dry wind out of the desert called a Santa Anna, you might imagine this current turn of weather events has me excited.

But everyone in town is very excited. We have gotten warnings from cable, our local electric company, giving us advice. My husband said many more people were out walking their dogs than usual, our neighbors on one side just pulled up with their trunk filled with “supplies,” and the neighbors across the street are sweeping up all the leaves in their front yard, one of them just went along our block and swept up all the leaves in the gutters along the street. Actually this was a really smart thing to do since our short block is pretty steep, and the end of the cul-de-sac there is a storm drain that then leads down to the canyon, the result being that--even with fairly moderate rain--because our block is one of the lowest places in the whole neighborhood, the gutters become minor streams, and when blocked can briefly spill over to yards.

Our preparations have been rather minor, my husband went to the store to get some meals he can cook up today, and we hardboiled a bunch of eggs to eat in case the electricity goes out and we need something that won’t spoil. I checked to make sure we had working flashlights and put towels down by the back door of the laundry room which often leaks if the wind is just right. My husband emptied the rain barrel, and put the patio umbrella down flat so it wouldn’t become a projectile. And we will make sure tonight that our computers and phones and ereaders are all charged.

And I will try to do some reports as the storm develops for those of you who enjoy watching me get excited about something that many of you would probably consider a summer storm. I will share them in the substack ap, Notes, which I believe you get notifications of if you have subscribed or followed me.

To start you off, yesterday, I believe because we are getting bands of clouds being thrown off by the approaching weather system, we got this very unusual band little clouds. We have gotten them before, in fact if you go back to that first post on weather as my favorite thing, you will see that I wrote the post in reaction to a similar kind of cloud. But I never ever have seen them line up in the following fashion (a thanks to my husband to taking the time to get this full view.)

In case you wondered, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. This is my newsletter reflecting on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. If you aren’t already subscribed but are interested in doing so, you can subscribe for free by clicking the little button below. If you enjoyed this post, please do click on the little heart and/or share with your friends.