A year ago
What I recall, from about year, without looking at the journal, is that I was wrestling with two questions, discontinue the monthly and moving the weekly publication date to Thursday. I wanted to concentrate on the most enjoyable aspects of work.
48 out of 52 of the weekly scopes were successful in the last year, from my point of view. That’s a 92% average. I’m calling it good, from my point of view. Good success rate, the way I see it.
Web tweaking included moving the journal to a more accessible format, one wherein I can update without having to be at my computer. I moved to Grey Matter, then more recently, over to pMachine. The backend, technical advantages and disadvantages are really all geek speak*.
I do recall grappling with certain design issues, and I think I finally got them all licked. At least, for the time being. The current page will break with older browsers, but at this point, I can only be so backward compatible. The folks with older browsers tend to not spend money on astrology readings anyway. More automated delivery (midnight, Central Time), quicker load, smaller footprint.
Up until a few weeks ago, writing the scopes remained as enjoyable as ever. Combination of factors at work here. It was last year, after an overwhelmingly successful January, that first Mercury Retrograde just knocked me right out. Went from “most excellent” to a whole week with nothing happening at all. That sort of cyclic activity is normal in freelance work. Even so, I’m still not used to it, not after fifteen years or more. Then, too, those low cycles seem to be punctuated with more than the duly allowable share of “you suck” flame mails.
It’s easy to deal with an occasional piece of crap email, but when it stacks up, and when there’s not much else coming in, it stings a little. Sometimes it hurts. Some of the mail is just plain mean, as well.
I recall being at the beach, outside Corpus Christi, sometime in the last year or two. I recall a Mexican expression, but I can’t do it justice in Spanish, although, I’m sure the phrase sounds sexier in that way, “The sea is a woman.” Or something like that, implying, that the sea has it cyclic moments, too. So the normally pristine sands of the beach, particularly at low tide, were covered with kelp. Churned up by weather, or some other natural phenomena, all that plant material was rotting on the beach, with a faint, sulphuric aroma. Didn’t detract from the rest of the beach, just along the water line, and just when the tide was out. Memory is hazy, but as I seem to recall, on some portions of the beach, the park department would run a land scraper over the washed up seaweeds to insure tourists wouldn’t be disturbed.
That aromatic detritus from the sea, washed out of the Gulf of Mexico, it gets carried further onshore by high tides. Then the northern wind whips down and pushes the meager dunes into the dried out vegetation, and it new plant life takes hold. It’s just nature’s little way of playing at the edge of the water. Cycles, nothing more – exactly the same as “you suck” email – and they both smell – but the flame mail doesn’t have an ocean breeze to wash away its odor.
On the second page of the preface, Prudence Macintosh writes (introduction to Sneaking Out), “I continue to believe, however, that life is richer and perhaps more understandable if I can wrestle it to the page.”
I have two core competencies on which I concentrate. Both enrich my life. One is weekly format set of horoscopes. The other is the journal. I do, on occasion, make a fool of myself. But looking at decade’s worth of content, I figure that has to stand for some kind of a curriculum vitae of some note.
That enough text for one novel per year, for a decade, no repeats. Interesting challenge, and after wrestling it to the page, one that I’m still enjoying. But I’m only doing the fun parts from now.
*I had a chance to play with journal layout, and the older format was a straight template done in an editor, and then I would upload the page fresh every day. At least one local reader has lamented the format change. But it’s tedious because the longer a journal got, the more trouble it was to upload. Plus, it meant I had to have a minimum of a phone line and power. With Grey Matter, the format is changeable, but it rebuilds all the files in the archives every time I changed the layout. The good aspect was that the individual entries were stored as separate html files, and thus searchable and indexed by search engines. Plus, all that is required is a browser. Update from any virtual place. pMmachine is similar in that I can update from any browser, plus is has several other nice additions, like a schedule and a flexible layout front. Up side – or down side – is that all the entries are stored in a MySQL database with PHP front end.