Query result - not to be sorted asc or desc

[Klaus Posenauer]

Hi - I'm a total newbie on MySQL
I have set up a database about locations and need to have the query result listed in the order of the query itself

Example

select l.notes from locations l where l.location = d or l.location = a or l.location = c or l.location = b
order by l.location = b , l.location = c, l.location = a, l.location = d

Which gives me the output in following order
d
a
c
b

That is the way I actually need the result. But above method seems very tedious to me in particular when we talk about 30 - 40 different locations.
Is there a different (shorter) way to achieve the same result (without having to go through the order by
location bits in reverse order)?

Any help would be appreciated.