I have writer’s block for the first time in my life. So, I thought I’d write about it! I am a pretty talkative person and I usually don’t have any trouble writing it down either. In fact, writing something out is better for me because I will think about it a little longer before I say it. Sometimes, I don’t even know what I really think until my fingers hit the keyboard. Writing helps me sort things out, to practice a little introspection, instead of letting the words hit my tongue from my brain like a gumball machine.
It’s odd to me at this particular juncture of my life, when I just finished a book, I should be stuck for words. What? Did I use them all up or something? When I get stuck, I get analytical and after days of asking myself for answers I have come to a conclusion. I think I temporarily lost my “voice”. For writers, a “voice” is their own unique and personal train of thought, the style, or way they write as well as, what they prefer to write about.
I am an astrologer but I am really more in my element just contemplating human nature in general or just nature, period. I am also an author and we all know what that means: marketing. Yech. These days, publishers want every author to have a ready-made audience. Forget taking any chances with anyone or even trying to understand what people want to read this year and why. You must have it all ahead of time: a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Words with Friends, OK maybe not Words with Friends. So here is my blog, but I don’t want to write about astrology all the time. While it is true, that after 46 years of studying and practicing astrology, I pretty much measure the world with its yardstick, it doesn’t mean that is the only thing that interests me. Life interests me, all of it, and the why of it and that is what I want to write about. Besides, most people aren’t familiar with the jargon we use in astrology and they don’t need to be in order to understand what I talk/write about. We all have the same kinds of questions and problems in life; they are just dressed up differently. Astrology simply gives me a more precise language with which to address our human habits. It also has a wonderful way of organizing our idiosyncrasies into richly-layered categories that allow for deeper dissections and therefore: study. I think my writer’s block came up when I started to think I had to write for publishers and not for me, or you. I hit the wall of “the influence of others” (more on that another time). I thought that somehow, having written a book I had to think and behave differently. I fell off my home base and my muse packed her bags. I may think that someone else does it better than I do and I should be more like them, but I am who I am and for good or bad, I can’t write any differently. It just doesn’t work. From here on in, I better remember that.
