Weekly Writing Intentions: Saturday, Sept 30, 2023

Daily Diary: , Day 1125:

Well, this week I excelled in exercising because I’ve done a good job of adding in chair exercises for balance and strength. When you include the 2 walks a day most days, plus regular cleaning schedule, I actually averaged 2 hours of exercise a day (broken up in nice chunks) for the week! My goal, as you might imagine, is to keep up the good work this coming week.

The writing, well not so good, at least in terms of progress. At the beginning of the week, I got a lot of writing time in, but most of it was cutting words so the start of the novel was tighter. This is progress, in that I probably won’t have to do as much cutting when I get to editing the completed draft. However, the fact that over the following three days I barely made my 500 words a day goal (499), and then the past two days I didn’t even attempt to write (after several nights of insomnia), meant my total new words for the week was a grand total of 3!

Needless-to-say, my intention for next week is to do better. However, I did make good use of the days when I was dragging because of lack of sleep, mostly getting ahead on posts for the coming weeks. So, I have tomorrow’s Historical Tidbits completed (this was an edited version of early blog posts so didn’t take up too much time), I am almost done with a draft of one of two background posts for the Paradisi Chronicles that will go up Tuesday and Thursday, and I have read and done some light editing of chapter 3 and 4 of The Stars are Red Tonight which will go up the following week.

I do have scheduled phone calls every day but next Saturday, but as of now, no other events like doctor’s appointments or friends coming to visit.

And I only have a couple of minor marketing tasks, which I hope to complete tomorrow. Oh, and I am pleased that I got another paid subscriber (ie patron) to my newsletter last week. I now have made enough to cover the promotion on Between Mountain and Sea that I am doing on October 6, as well as a couple of low-cost ads for Uneasy Spirits because both the ebook and audiobook versions are heavily discounted for the month of October. So, yay!

As for today, after eight hours sleep last night, which has at least caught me up a little, and having completed my cleaning and morning walk, I hope to start back to work on the novel as soon as I post this. Maybe even get 500 words written today! Wish me luck!

In case you aren’t sure how you got here, 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 by clicking the little button below. If you enjoyed this post, please do click on the little heart and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments!