Yes, it’s me…I’ve been missing in action for a while but now I’m back.
What have I been up to? I’m glad you asked.
In short, I’ve been working and I’ve been writing – and sometimes writing and working.
Towards the end of October, I finished one novel – it’s ready and waiting to go off and be formatted for publication – and during November I joined in with everyone else doing Nanowrimo and wrote the first 50odd thousand words of another. The words almost seemed to write themselves – something that hasn’t happened since I wrote the first draft for Big Girls Don’t Cry. I wrote a wrap-up of this year’s nanowrimo challenge here.
What’s stranger is that this book is different to everything I’ve written before. My characters are grown up – my age, or thereabouts – with grown-up problems. They’re dealing with mid-life stuff and adult children and the problems and decisions that we face in those years. It’s actually been a tad confronting to write.
It makes sense though that I’m writing both so prolifically and outside my own boundaries. Jupiter (which is natally in my 5th house of creativity) while in Scorpio is transiting my 9th house and I’m challenging both my own beliefs and my own boundaries.
I was saying at an Astro group that I’ve become involved with since moving to the Sunshine Coast, that it was Jupiter’s transit of Scorpio and the 9th house 12 years ago that had me reading anything I could lay my hands on about astrology. I began formal learning in 2007, but it was in late 2005, 2006 that I really started trying to teach myself about astrology. I began going below the surface, looking deeper into something that was, at that time, beyond the scope of anything I’d learned about previously.
It was through this learning that I got into blogging and started writing, and through that rediscovered the ambitions I had as a child to become an author and write love stories. Strange how it all works out.
What else? During October I did a short road trip a few hours up the road to Bundaberg, and a couple of weeks ago I had a long weekend in Wellington, New Zealand, visiting my bestie.
Coming up we have that same bestie and her family over for Christmas and will be doing another short break up to Fraser Island while they’re here. On the radar for next year (so far) is another mini break to Melbourne, three weeks in Northern France visiting another friend, a road trip to the Snowy Mountains in July/August, and something else yet to be determined in November.
And yes, the last time Jupiter was in my 9th house it was a similar situation, although all my travel then was for work.
The big news for December is Saturn moving into Capricorn for the first time in nearly 30 years. Saturn was in Capricorn from Feb 1988 – June 1988, and Nov 1988 – Feb 1991. Of course I’ll pop something up, but for now have a think back (if you can remember back that far or were alive then, of course) to what was going on in your life at that time.
I began working for a bank in Feb 1988 as an Economics Graduate, met my (now) husband in June of that year and started dating him in June 1989. We moved into the first house that we’d bought together the weekend before Christmas in 1990.
I was just 21 when Saturn moved into Capricorn, but he was 27 and, with Saturn natally in Capricorn in his chart, committing to both me and the house was his Saturn Return.
If you want the actual dates, Saturn moves into Capricorn on December 20 (Aus time).
Other key dates for your diary are:
December 1 – Venus into Sagittarius
December 3 – Mercury retrograde
December 9 – Mars into Scorpio
December 20 – Saturn into Capricorn
December 22 – Sun into Capricorn
December 23 – Mercury Direct
December 25 – Venus into Capricorn
I’ve also spent a large chunk of time over the last few weeks organising my other website Joanne Tracey – The Rambles of A Hungry Writer. If you’re interested in what I’ve been up to in my normal life, are interested in the process of writing, or maybe keen to check out a recipe or a destination, jump on over there. I’m more than a little proud of what I’ve created.
