Knit and Wit

I am knitting up a storm and it has been zenlike. The peace and calm of slowly making something is unlike watching television, which was my usual pastime. I was told men do not knit. Well thier loss.There is so much out there online to learn. Videos help me the most because I guess it is easier seeing it done than long explanations. And it is much easier than I would have ever dreamed to do. Ribbing tickles me, it is like bong! It is so elastic. It is what holds up your socks people! Wow. You can have that cardigan blue and orange if you want it(I happen to love blue and orange) or any color when you make it yourself. When I lived is Alabama blue and orange were Auburn University colors and people thought I was supporting the football team. No, just love the color combination. But yarn is expensive as I have discovered. Who would have thunk making something yourself would cost more? I confess I pass on the cheap acrylic and run to cashmere and angora because I love it! Soft as a child's sweet dream and drapes besutifully. Mmmm... what to make next?

The Newbie's Guide to Publishing

This blog is one I like. This guy is something of a perfectionist and a moralist. We should not ask friends to post reviews of our book on Amazon and things like that. I personally don't think all the reviews in the world will help a bad book, just ruin somebody's day. If however your book is good then okay. Who however is objective when it comes to their own work? Writers tend to think every word is solid gold. If you do have questions he answers them clearly. One of the things I always wanted to know is how much a writer makes, and boy does he answer that question! You get a clear idea of what is possible and how publishing works. It is a great blog. He appears to be the hardest working author on the planet. His heroine in Whiskey Sour is a person who is driven to do one thing above all else, catch the killer. In that way she is like the author himself. (These books are like the Stephanie Plum novels and just as fun to read) The theme is to relax a little and stop and smell the roses, something the author appears to be telling himself!
      The authors name is J. Konrath and he sells books on his blog and on Amazon. You're welcome.

Economize

I have a friend who cannot quit his job, even though he is far past retirement age. He has too much to pay! He has satellite television, a car payment and medical bills. (I still don't understand how inflation is making medical bills skyrocket upwards and how that can bankrupt the country. I get this picture of all the people that work in the medical profession having all the money and the rest of us are begging on street corners.) This is what is going to happen to our generation. Unable to retire, we continue to work. Well, with stocks doing the hutchie coochie and interest rates rock bottom would you want to buy an IRA right now? This favors spending. We are supposed to spend our money and save the economy. If people would only spend they lament on CNN. What is that supposed to mean?
Okay, think on this. One of the first rules of contract law is that both parties have to understand the agreement before signing. Who of us understands our credit card contract? The mission in this is to mislead, if not downright cheat. What about the lottery? Here is another case of those ill-equipped to handle money recieving it, after the IRS gets a big chunk and the place that sold the winning ticket gets some. It seems very bad to lift someone up and give them no help. Remember watching My Fair Lady and thinking how unfair it was that he had raised her up from her social station and then dumped her back on the street she came from? Isn't this essentially the same thing?
What we do is never eat out at restaurants. Never, never, never. I find myself crazy seeing ads on television and tell myself it is not as good as it looks. What in advertising ever is? Discover the joys of squash, the meat replacing power of beans, the way to cook bacon in the oven ( and watch like a hawk ). I find myself blown away by the simple tip that water will boil faster if you put a lid on it. Wow, this really works. My tip is the noble large lima bean. My mother thought this was absolutely necessary to eat every night and I fought the taste by covering them with ketchup. Time however has brought wisdom and a pound of dried beans and one strip of bacon will in due course produce a masterpiece that mashed up with cornbread makes me happy. You cannot ruin this. If the water gets low and the mixture is thick, add water. It is this soup, this marvelous spoonfuls of flavor spiced with a little pork, that is delicious so add water generously. So much food for so little and I never miss the meat.
So who for president, I for one do not know. I can read articles that make me like Romney and articles that shine a lustrous light on Obama. One thing I do think is that government is a business, although a poorly run one everyone seems to agree. On that basis I like Romney. Obama is like a dream that seems impossible. Can we really provide medical care for all? This sounds like a fantasy spun from the other side of reality. I like it, I just don't think we can have it.
Let whoever be president it doesn't seem to matter. I think a downward trend is where we are going.
But hey,. what do I know?

Noble Romance

This publisher is offering advances and asking for anything, literally anything. Click submissions once you get there if you are writing romances, and us women if we are not writing them, we are reading them.
I gave some thought to the idea that we have to support our authors by buying books. I usually get my books at the library but I bought Dean Koontz's new book, Shadow Street. The book was the usual from the master of disaster and murder however after reading his newsletter and his website I think sometimes he should write comedy. An author who always works hard, this book still reminded me of someone else, Stephen King. Harlequin sent me some books but I found the language stumbling and the heroines a bit stupid. I am wanting a heroine who is smart and can make things happen! Those are the ones I love. Happy reading.

Preston and Child

I have read every book by these 2 authors I can get my hands on. I've always been interested in science and these guys are up to the task in their writing. I, who have perhaps read too many books, have grown bored with books in which I know what is going to happen. With these guys you can't guess usually anyway.
They created a sort of James Bond character named Pendergast, but he really isn't like Bond. He reminds you of Bond with his abilities and the fact that he is wealthy and an F.B.I. agent. He is not handsome for one thing and young women don't fall all over his path. What he does is bring the quality of brains to the story.
In one story he meets a girl in a hick town who is the town "Goth" and the town's reject. What can you expect when her mother is a drunk and she has no father and a filthy trailer to call home? At the end of the novel he tells her how he has registered her for school and giving her money which she at first refuses. He then tells her the money was obtained illegally by a member of his family and he wishes to help the family name by doing good deeds with the money. But I am a freak! she cries and he tells her that he is one too and he did well and so could she, but she had to get out of this town, the town was killing her.
I thought it was art, the way he summed everything up that way. Yes Pendergast is a freak, an albino with snow white hair and strange ways and who finds it difficult to say thank you to anyone but he has found a way to live with it. Intelligent people are often freaks. I think he is alluding here to the fact that people tend to pigeonhole you, and she needed to get out of the town to start a new life because you can never get away from your box they put you in. I live in a small town and they have their ways and one must adapt of course. It can cause the worst kind of claustrophobia, my daughter couldn't wait to get out of town in spite of the fact she has dear friends here.
Pendergast chasing murderers, and I am bit tired of them it's the only fiction I can find much of that I like. The attraction is I think that people find it tantalizing that someone they know is in disguise, for someone among them was capable of murder. It's the social mask, what evil does it hide? It appears from the many murders that go unsolved, it hides a lot.

Arabic Lots

Dreamhouse Attic is a site with a great deal of the arabic lots, this is a sort of formula using the Ascendant of your astrology chart. Finding money in the chart is a pastime I seem to never tire of, so my fav is the Lot of Wealth. Destiny seems to have plowed a course and left this birth chart of mine to remember it by, for it seems all things were foreshadowed and if the ancients thought one day they could predict everyone's life, well millions have been spent trying to predict the weather. What we find is that the weather cannot be predicted, it can be linked to probabilities and that is exactly what astrology is. To be sure I have felt the jealousies of Venus in Scorpio and a great deal of puzzlement has been with me as to why I, the least jealous of all people should find myself so fiercely jealous when it comes to my love life. It has been said the percentage of correct prediction is 84 percent, which isn't bad. I try to change myself, self-improve myself and have been ever since elementary school when no one liked me. Yet with this comes the question of why, since these things were not linked to my personality or some lack in myself although I do have lacks of course but rather to my family messing up my life with great impact and ignorance of that fact. Still a malignant mother and a teacher getting her revenge on my family is not good luck, is it? Authority of all kinds has failed me, parents, teachers, policemen, bosses. I do not see this in my astrology chart but somehow I don't doubt it is there. With astrology everything is explained, and it does so beautifully.
Those who follow astrology usually do so because their lives are so very bad that they start searching for answers. It seems horrible to have such bad luck, but it is better at least to feel you understand it. I myself have planets without essential dignities which means to talk without tact, to be quarrelsome, to be always butting ones head against authority. So it has been, but I still feel that is right to do so. It seems sad somehow to blend in and yet I long for it like sunshine in the winter. It is sad to melt into the crowd and be forgotten, but somehow I think we are forgotten anyway.

Writing

As joyful as it can be to write when you want to the opposite is true if you don't want to. It seems that everyone wants to do it and to learn how to do it but it is about a huge investment in time, discipline, and faith. Where does one find the confidence to chose a path anyway? There are so many options.
They tell me the public brought paranormal to the fore, but the many half vampire, half werewolf, half of somethings make me cringe. It's almost as if we've got this new material but we've got to do the same things with it. We go for newness but somehow we can't arrive. Newness must arrive with the person themselves, who they are and what they think and what they write cannot be separated. I get these impressions from the huge amount of reading that I do, almost a book a day and no, I am not joking. What I get is a tiredness of this glut of stories, a sense of sameness, that I'm reading the same thing over and over. What I want is unpredictability in story even as it is in life. The thing that books did for me when I was between being a child and an adult doesn't happen now. This overwhelming sense of possibility.
Being a writer is an odd thing, people study it and even so I don't think it has parameters. The simple telling of story seems to be enormously complicated.
NEVER start a story with a character waking up.
NEVER change point of view
NEVER start with It was a dark and stormy night unless you are Snoopy the dog.
NEVER have the main character be the murderer or an awful person.
NEVER tell a characters dream in detail
NEVER use the passive voice, actually this is very useful.
NEVER use exclamation points.
NEVER have the answer be aliens did it unless things are exceedingly odd all around during the story.
NEVER forget to enclose a self addressed postage paid envelope
NEVER call editors constantly or make a pest of yourself. I'm told publishing is a small world.
NEVER use colored paper or confetti or perfumed paper.
NEVER have characters on drugs or depict drugs in any other way than dangerous, deadly, and unsavory
NEVER say love does not exist. Make those dreams come true at least on the page.
I think it wise to remember that people who do read like some wordplay and things of that nature because they love words. That's why they are reading.
This is a list of advice I've read or been given. It is not I who is wise and know these things. I do however, cook a mean fried chicken.

Life by Keith Richards

This book is like a very long interview with the rocker and guitarist for the Rolling Stones. The strangest thing about it are the things he says about drugs and his drug use, and how they kept throwing him in jail and two years later they were naming streets in his native part of London after his songs. He says that he wrote the music and Jagger would do the words, which didn't suprise me. I was suprised that Jagger can play, he just doesn't do so onstage. As for Brian Jones in this memoir he comes off looking not so good, a man who was violent with his girlfriends and often so stoned he couldn't contribute to a recording session even if he did manage to get there. As for his death Keith says that he was so self-destructive that he himself was to blame for his death regardless of all the theories that maybe the guy he hired as a contractor killed him. For anyone who does not know, Brian was found dead in his own swimming pool the same night there was a party at his house. He is perhaps most known for playing the sitar on "Paint It Black" Keith has shown regret and shame in interview but not over his drug use, but over the fact he took Brian's girlfriend Anita away from him sometime in the late sixties. I see it that way, the way he stares defiantly at the interviewer. Somehow he is ashamed. In his new book he says he rescued Anita from a violent Brian, but it is odd how Anita goes from Brian to Keith to Mick. Anita was with Keith the longest, for many years and supposedly with Mick only once. It is like that song "You're So Vain" where she sings "You're with some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend." I used to think for that reason that song was about Mick Jagger, but now it seems to be about Warren Beatty. Beatty says it is about him, just as the song says. Marianne Faithful, singer of "As Tears Go By" and Mick's girlfriend claims she went to bed with three of them in an interview. Perhaps most telling of all, Keith writes Gimme Shelter while Anita is filming Performance with Mick and he suspects having an affair with her. Looking back on it, he says maybe that song had something to do with that though at the time he didn't make that connection. I rather think these proper English boys are so out of touch with their feelings, and when Keith writes about Mick he leaves out a lot. He says that Mick is his "mate" but on one tour they refused to talk to each other at all so had to speak to each other through other people. I can imagine people running back and forth with "messages" So perhaps this book, as very thick as it is, leaves a lot of unanswered questions after all. I have an idea that Keith is not very introspective and perhaps doesn't know exactly how to put things into words at all. I was suprised how much of the book I already knew. Perhaps that is why Keith writes songs, to say the things he cannot say.

Shadowfever by Moning

I have followed this series and this book is the last one I'm sorry to say. The Fae care nothing for humans and are so sensual and beautiful that it is more than a poor human can stand. Yet stand this heroine MacKayla or "Mac" must for to fall under thier spell is to lose oneself entirely and become a sex slave or "Pri-ya".
In the first book she meets Barrons and who he is exactly is never explained but he is so powerful even the Fae fear him. Lost in the dangers that the shadows of Dublin, Ireland hold she sees a bookstore with all it's lights lit up where she meets Barrons. He never lets the lights go out for shadows hold creatures who would suck the life out of you. She meets Barrons and immediately they are attracted to each other and start to argue with each other. They can't stop fighting with one another even though the attraction between them is so strong. This love or hate relationship is the center of the story.
The books are sort of ghoulish, sort of like a book about zombies might be. She kills a lot of creatures in these books. The books they also say are very sexy, but if you read them there is very little sex in these books. There is sexual tension so tight I wanted to shout at these characters, get together already!! There is so much action that it is hard for these two just to keep up with each other and they lose each other entirely sometimes.
This is most of all a romance and a sensuous one at that. I hear it is very successful. That is as it should be. This is what I did last weekend, all weekend, is read Shadowfever.

Food Network

I am addicted to Food Network which annoys my family so much I wonder why. What could be more harmless and easy to watch than cooking? I can't believe you can make ice cream without an ice cream maker. I can't believe you can buy potatoes you don't have to peel (Yukon Golds and Fingerling potatoes). I am amazed that pickle making should be so easy, or that soup doesn't have to simmer for hours and follow a complicated recipie. In short, I'm sort of learning how to cook and my family who only wants meatloaf or fried chicken and macaroni and cheese only out of the box is starting to wonder where it will all end. Where will it all end?
I want to eat roasted Beets and try fish blackened with cajun spices in a cast iron skillet. I want to coconut my shrimp and use a white sauce for once on spaghetti. My family is having the horrors and refusing to eat.
What is a mom to do?
Well, I go ahead and cook the same old thing and watch food network and write down interesting things in a notebook. I told you it's a real addiction!
Meanwhile, I wonder if Bobby Flay dies his hair. It changes subtly in color and early photos show him as a carrot top. I wonder why Paula Deen's sons changed so much on her show as time went on, they were so embarrassed by their mother once! I wonder if Big Daddy has a wife and really makes up all those recipies. I wonder if the Semi-Homemade lady really is like that, and if Emeril has an ego as huge as he appears to have. (Can anyone be filled with so much confidence and self-love?) I have to go now. I wonder what is on Food Network.....

What I Am Thankful For

My daughters are like two pockets full of sunshine in that they are so very much themselves and I am always impressed by them and amazed that I had children and those children are these two wierd and intelligent and fearless and energetic and enthusiastic people who are not at all like me.
I suppose it's what you get when children are a little spoiled as mine are, they have a feeling of entitlement. They think they are supposed to have things when they need them in spite of the fact we live below the poverty level. We do make fantastic efforts to see every need is met, but I am not Wonder Woman. My youngest informed me she need a laptop computer pronto. My magic wand is all out of power as my wallet is out of money. She is serene. She knows that somehow I'll find a way.
If you love them they grow up with a tough skin and a confidence that cannot be shaken later on. My daughter, who used to sing with a blanket over her head she was so shy, is now in the regional choir as the seventh soprano. We just told her she could sing, over and over and I guess she believed.
My eldest loves small children. She was able to get a job as a teacher's assistant. How blessed to do work that you love! I am so happy for her. Small kids fill her with energy and sparkle and she brings home tales of what this little boy or girl did all the time. She usually finishes by saying, "And they were so CUTE!" She is going to college to be a kindergarten teacher.
Actually our house is more like Rosanne's than Everybody Loves Raymond. We fight and yell a lot. My kids do very little around the house and washing dishes is out of the question. On the other hand, we are not model parents for we lost the power somehow to tell them what to do and them pay attention.
Oh well.
If they tell me to jump into the lake I am glad at least that they are able to tell me that. When I was a kid I didn't dare disagree with my parents and my Dad had a mean backhand slap. So in a way it's all kind of bittersweet.

A Need for Speed

I think some of us writers have a need for it, speed I mean. The mind wanders, real life intrudes, you lose focus, you forgot what you were aiming for originally, or worst of all, you get bored with it. Your writing for some is a polishing act, for some a book is written in a moment or one afternoon. The words just had to be written down later, you just had it all in a flash!
I dislike keeping a journal. Why? I whine a lot. I'm bored with writing down things I already know. Some things I don't want to remember, for instance I can conveniently forget things if I chose. It makes life livable. For instance, my best friend died and I was tortured every year when her birthday came around. I told myself to forget it, and I didn't remind myself of the date she died either. I didn't want to remember. Some things I do I'm not proud of, for instance I have great difficulty remembering when I was fired from a job. In fact, I can't remember when I was hired or when I quit jobs in the past when filling out new job applications, ya know? It slipped my mind. Sorrow is the impetuous for my forgetfullness. I'm wistful at leaving a job and the people I would know no more every time. I do creative filling out of applications, if anyone noticed they never said anything to me.
Creativity in a sense is a necessity. You have to tell the story of your life to yourself in a sense. I can ride out painful memories by flooding my mind with other things or keeping busy. I tell myself I am still a good person when I do something wrong. I tell myself I am a good person when I do something good or right. So basically I'm just flattering myself all the time. I need that.
What do I miss in books??? The sense that anything could happen I used to have. The sense that what I am reading is real, (I forgot it was fiction) There is magic in us for sure but people tend to churn out what they have read before. Do we want a suspense novel? Do we want a romance? Do we want an historical suspense romance science fiction paranormal? Why not? Publishing has it's niches of course. In a life, all those niches could possibly be present, couldn't they?
What is present is that people are reading books, regardless of what you hear. Reading itself for me is something I would do even if what I was reading was bad, I am that addicted. As addictions go it is a strangely wholesome one. My life is so small outside, but so big inside. (This sounds like a science fiction novel, doesn't it? Sci-fi loves the tiny and the giants colliding with us who seem to be the same (right) size.
What a book is is a mind. This mind believes certain things and thinks certain things are possible and others are impossible. It doesn't mean that's the way it is, it's just interesting to peek into the internal workings.
Scientists say our brain cells or whatever mirror the person speaking to us, as if in sympathy. This is a biological thing. They say books are all about emotions really. So we feel right along with the character and this is the way we were wired and this is the way God meant it to be. So when the book leads us we follow, no matter how unwilling we are in the beginning and that is the essence of what a novel or a movie is. So we are all mirrors, hmm.....
I think that is why we love Stephen King. He said himself he doesn't know where the story is going when he writes it, to him it is like real people moving against a changing universe and where his characters show hidden depths and where he travels along like another passenger wanting to find out the end. He likens what he does to archealogy, or digging something up that already exists. Now that does seem like real life to me where we don't know how things are going to turn out and where we are constantly suprised ( and disappointed).
My favorite King story is The Body from Different Seasons. Why? It stuck with me, that's all, with a vividness other things don't have. King remembers best being 12 I think. He writes best about being a kid.
What do I write best about? I don't know because my mind is all phantoms that vanish when I try to write them. Perhaps I'm not a writer at all. It takes a doggedness and a stubborness it may be I don't have. Maybe it's just that when things hurt too much I try to forget them and that is the last thing a real writer needs.

Opposites Attract

Who is our opposite?
Astrology says it is your Sun Signs opposite, if you are a Sagittarius then Gemini is your opposite, is you are an Aries then it is all Libras. Scorpio who always want to dig deeper for the truth find their opposite in Taureans, who just want to enjoy a good meal and fill their Venus ruled senses with pleasure. ( For an idea of who represents Taurus well, Cher has a peregrine Taurus Sun so could be said to be that almost perfect Taurean expression.)
If you do your natal chart then then it is the 7th house which represents "others." It is the house of lovers and also the house of open enemies. Don't lovers sometimes turn into enemies! Then look to the ruler of the 7th to see how your relationships pan out. The ruler of my 7th happens to be in the 12th house. It is said this is the house you cannot see, the house of your blind spots and it is true that I cannot figure out relationships. When they fail I don't know why, but vaguely feel it is my fault. (The 12th is associated with secret sorrows.) I find this interesting. Interesting that my 7th is Taurus and that I'm married to a Taurus. So what does the sign on the 7th house mean?
It means these are the people you are going to run into, for good or for ill, for your whole life. They seem to find you. You can run but you cannot hide, for your opposite is what you long for to fulfill you.
The Taurus love and appreciation of beauty and the sign's beautiful self-containment and caring not a whit what others might think is a wonderful thing. This is what we want in our opposite sign.

Watch A Baby Day Be Born

Whatever happened to the singer of "Brand New Key"? She sings I've got a brand new pair of roller skates and you've got a brand new key in her happy bopper song and my friend Sherry said she lost her credibility with such a silly song. At any rate I didn't hear her on the radio anymore. For me female writers and singers of songs are superior to that of males, the female capacity for understanding and empathy is just greater I've always thought. Melanie Safka inspired me when I was very young and I cannot even explain the hold she had on my imagination. I became a vegetarian for a short while because of her, and I find that strange for no one loves a burger more than me. I thought it would give me her spirituality and artistic ability but all it did was make me light headed. I didn't feel grounded eating vegetables. Is that wierd? It does seem to make one think more and all those higher I.Q. Asians and their rice diets can't be wrong can they? We believe things without proof, we feel our way through life, we emulate those we love just because we like the songs they sing so very much.

Do you have a photograph, when you were still in high school?

Were you happy in it, little reason lots of rhyme,

Were you happy in it at the time

Deep down in your memory do you recall the lines

when your heart was in it but your reason changed your mind

When you would love forever, but your reason changed your mind.

Melanie later in her career sang such songs of disappointment and she seemed so innocent and so full of love at the beginning.

You see she was the actress who played the part of snow

they asked her to play starshine she turned down the role

they asked her to play windsong well she'd give it a try then they asked her to play music,

her own sweet music ah,

they asked her to play music

and she sang 'till she died

So at sixteen I set my alarm for 5 just to watch a baby day be born just like in the song. Art might imitate life but I say life imitates art much more.

Tower

I used to imagine my room a tower
me a princess enslaved
and out there lovely meadows
till the cliffs met the sea
and no one to question
who I am as me
as I sit here watching the radio towers
that blink on my slow rivers
that may one day find the sea
I have loved my own words
better than life itself
and I find no reflection of
what I have understood
in what I meant

Wilderness

Does God see this wilderness
below his feet
and when He hears the poems
does he think of me
you see like Shelley
I wrote of him enough
and that's enough to be a troubadour
that's enough of love
there's a wind rippling by His ear
of songs each of us have sung
and if He caught a harmony
will He come?

Who?

You always told the truth you know
you said this day would come and then it came and now
there's no one else who understands me
so I talk not being understood
just to talk, enjoying the words I know you'd know
if you were here
but you're not and never can be
you led always I followed
but I cannot follow you there
Then autumn your favorite season comes
and I'm reminded of everything I might've done wrong
I want to work in this Mordor, this place without light,
until tiredness leads to numbness
until I can find the pieces of my heart

A Promise

I may do nothing now or never
to reach that something I can't define
I may run far never to get
away from whatever behind
the only certainty is that today
more than any other day
so uncertainly lived
I feel the need to escape
those tomorrows like today
and you like a tomorrow never seen
like a promise will shine
and smile in my dreams

Pallas, Vesta and Chiron in Astrology

Astrology seems to always have something new and the explosion of knowledge about Chiron is one example. Said to tell of where we are psychically wounded, it always tells of where we can find our greatest talents and strengths. Look at me. I am a writer. I have Chiron in Aquarius in the third house, exactly the same placement as Robin Williams although I haven't his sense of humor. Aquarius always speaks of something unusual and the 3rd house is above all the house of communication. There is more in my chart about the difficulty I've always had with talking to people or communicating.
I have the Sun in the middle of Mercury and Saturn, so my Sun is a blend of Mercury and Saturn. If there is a planet at a midpoint this is very important. Any Mercury Saturn aspect represents blockage and frustration. I have an aspect between Mercury and Pluto, which represents a childhood in which words would used cruelly or with the desire to dominate and intimidate the child. Mercury occupies however my 2nd house of assets. So the planet of communication is my greatest asset! Whew! So, am I any good at it, at writing? Where in my chart am I competent?
The asteroid that shows what you are good at is Pallas. I have Pallas in the 3rd house of communication. Pallas is very useful when looking at charts.
The asteroid that shows where you want to work hard is Vesta. I have Vesta conjunct Mercury. Once again work, communication and Mercury are linked.
My Arabic lot of Exaltation is Virgo. Virgo represents the secretary, the maid, the accountant, the sort of detailed work and preciseness my father did for a living as an engineer. Virgo is ruled by Mercury.
If you have your chart done at Astro.com you will see the x in a circle which means the Path to Fortune. What planets aspect the path of fortune are those which will help you achieve success. Mine own aspects Mercury and Jupiter in the 10th in Libra. What does this mean?
It means a Mercurial or Jupiterian career, career is also indicated by planets in the 10th. Libra is an artistic sign so this means an artistic career. Mercury in Capricorn, well Capricorn is a sign with drive and ambition and it's also an earth sign. The sign of Capricorn doesn't seem to be about a career as a writer at all, but I remember that the sign is our style of communicating and not what we chose to communicate about. What sign Mercury is in won't tell us what our career will be, rather it will say how we will talk to our co-workers when we get there. Mercury to some degree is about our intelligence however and what we are smart at processing with our communicating.
Chiron is the most interesting at all. It's said what we are bad at in Chiron in our early life is what is our greatest talent later on. Malcom X couldn't read or write until he went to prison. He couldn't understand the words so he asked for a dictionary. He started writing down the dictionary starting with the letter A. He became a great speaker and writer of several books. He became famous. The fact he couln't read or write brought him down to being a criminal early in life, and then became his greatest asset later in life. It's a great thing, Chiron. Since Chiron orbits between cosmic Uranus and down-to-earth Saturn it is thought that Chiron is a bridge between spiritual gifts and the realities of life threatening to crush our spirits. Some astrologers think we have an advantage over those who lived without Chiron, the discovery of something is linked to it's usefullness and our awareness of it. So even if Chiron and Pluto existed before, they were not making an impression on people's birth charts. Chiron and Pluto say we can transform ourselves and live a better life on a more spiritual plane. The emphasis seems to be on self improvement. We don't know ourselves very well, as Malcom X could have told you. He had no idea until he went to prison the great thoughts that he could think once he had the leisure time and inclination to think them. I think for many of us, we have hidden potential and astrology can be a clue to opening up that treasure box.

Patients Like Me

If you have fibromyalgia as I have, it can be very confusing. There are many mysterious symptoms and even one's thinking can be affected. (They call this "fibro fog". It is also called "cognitive function")
Wouldn't it be nice if you could get together with people who had the same thing and compare notes? Do you ever wonder what other treatments are out there?
Now you can find out on this site. There is even a search thing on it so you can find out which ones are in your state for example, or who has the same disease or syndrome (fibro is sometimes called a syndrome, don't know why) as you do.
I've felt like I've been lied to for instance. When I first was diagnosed by my doctor, he told me fibromyalgia is not "progressive". What this means is that it doesn't get any worse. (It also doesn't get any better.) My fibromyalgia has in fact gotten a great deal worse. I was curious if other people were experiencing such a great increase in pain and I found this site.
It is said that some doctors report a whooping 10 % of patients they see have fibromyalgia. Often they are not believed to suffer any pain at all by loved ones or even by their own doctors. There is no test for fibromyalgia, it's just a bunch of symptoms with no discernible cause. It's maddening to hear people tell me it's all in my mind. If only people could be me for a minute, they'd feel some pain alright. Fibromyalgia has become a sort of "blanket" diagnosis for anyone who comes in with aches & pains and no known cause. It's easy to write it off as such and prescribe anti-depressants because often depression causes aches and pains just like fibromyalgia.
Recent research suggests that fibromyalgia and depression are not related after all, and they've found people not depressed who have it. However I think it likely that someone who suffers such pain might very well become depressed.
I remember when I got it. I lay on the bed and every joint in my body was pounding with a painful rhythm. In those early days I didn't get headaches like I do now, I merely thought it was the onset of arthritis.
There is a funny story I have to tell. I was amused to read that striped clothing or anything with stripes make many fibromyalgia patients seasick. It causes the eyes to sort of mess up and it was one of the things I noticed. I told my hubby that and he laughed and laughed at me, but I was dead serious. There is a long list of fibro symptoms that can mess with your head and make you think your brain is rotting away up there. The hair loss I found hard, as I was very vain about my hair. Still I would go bald is that is what it took to get rid of the pain. Pain is a terrible tyrant, taking away humor and any enjoyment and making one quite stupid and irritable. Irritability and a short temper are what I have, so I turn to silence. Saying nothing insures I will not say something I am sorry for later.
Pain is my mistress and I have to dance to her tune. She rules my life. One day maybe research will find a cure. I hope so.