Writing at 2 AM

Writing at 2 AM

Write for an hour, every morning? Most near a year back or so, I started using my own version of a bullet journal, but it’s not a real Bullet Journal, just a short notebook with simple goals. Occasionally, notes, or quotes, like a quick jot from The Two Noble Kinsmen.

A few weeks into this near two-month lockdown, I started to lose my way.

What eventually brought me back, besides an ingrained habit of writing every morning? Finally getting around to setting simple goals, like I usually do, in that journal.

But this isn’t new, I write about it, been doing this a long time.

Variants of my daily weblog are 21 years — or older. The weekly horoscope hits 25 years this summer, and the regular production of a Horoscopic Material, loosely titled “Fishing Guide to the Stars,” available online since 1993? Its roots are deeper, and a private group on social media messaged me (I hate being thusly messaged, FYI) about a reunion from AZ days, so that’s more than 30 years.

Reminded me of the original broadsheet “zine” version of horoscopes, around 1987. The first copy isn’t dated — I have to go by which student barrio I was in at the time.

This lockdown produces some strange results.

Writing at 2 AM

Sign Ruler

Sign Ruler

As a cursory event, I was diligently avoiding responsibilities, and I stumbled across an image on the — who knows? Someplace. However, it made sense. I wondered about planets, houses, and associations with signs for many years, and I’ve toyed with meaning, and then, a simple panic-pandemic image solved it all. Toying with the image in my own way, I recreated it in that “not a bullet journal” I use.

The simple diagram sewed up the ideas, the concepts and the way the signs — and their associated planets — cohabit in an astrology chart. That’s what this is about, sticking together our collectively ripped fabric of reality.

Writing at 2 AM

As noted before, I’ve been at this for a while. The horoscopes are still “under construction,” and therefore, moving forward — as planned.

Most days, I get a respectable volume of text wrestled to the page. Then again, there are other days, and I remember reading one author’s understanding, he had several best-seller books out, very funny writer, and he claimed that he thought it was a good day if he managed to get 200 words committed to the page.

My goal is based upon another novelist’s urging of “Four typed, manuscript pages per day. Until the pages are done? Nothing else.”

Depends on the day, and depends on the situations, and under the suggested “Shelter in Places” decree?

I found myself going back to the idea of the simple set of goals, like “Update the site’s Terms of Service” as a daily target, simple, measurable, realistic, and time-bound problems I can fix.

That, and, of course, writing a thousand words every morning.

Write every day. Quoted from the masters elsewhere?

“I can’t not write.”

Two-Meat Tuesday

TMTthumb.jpg

Two-Meat Tuesday – Kramer Wetzel

Two-Meat Tuesday: Astrofish.Net/Xenon

San Pedro Creek (temporarily free e-book)

#tuesday

#HashTagsSuck

Inner Planets

Inner Planets

Strictly speaking the inner planets are merely Mercury and Venus. However, as I work through so many astrology charts, the way I add several planets together, I tend to treat Mars, Venus, Mercury, and sometimes, the Moon all as inner planets. Kind of depends.

Helps to lump these together, though, in astrological interpretations, as they all are fast moving, when compared with other influences. Quick planets mean change.

Working through the Mars section, I was reminded of an interaction with a certain person. She was meeting with me, and despite typical December’s weather in South Texas, she was sweating. I thought it was my raw appeal, but as we discussed business then moved onto astrology charts, I realized it was Mars.

Mars made her sweat.

Inner Planets

Inner planets get a special focus. This year, as we are in the midst of Venus in apparent retrograde motion, even now.

A reputed software developed recently rolled an update, and it included some new, or new-isn Google Fonts. Which meant, I spent several hours, first, trying to look up the fonts themselves by their varied and confusing titles, then looking at the display renderings, and finally, plugging in various fonts on the test website, to see what looked good, what appeared more readable, and what looked stupid.

Hours, standing at my desk, messing with fonts. What I wound up doing, after searching, fiddling, clicking, uploading, downloading and everything else? I wound up right back where I started. Same font. Site’s backend is a little leaner and cleaner, but yeah, back where I started. It’s a Venus in Retrograde message about taste and not altering what already works.

Inner Planets

As the other inner planet? Mercury gets his own little book, dealing with the exigencies, then anecdotes and antidotes for Mercury Retrograde, which I cover in my Portable Mercury Retrograde

Kramer Wetzel’s little book of transits

“Coming Soon, to a bookseller near you.”

Draft Cover

210 Fishing

210Fishing

210Fishing

IQ (book 1)

IQ (book 1)

IQ – Joe Ide

The Libby San Antonio Public Library app has an option to read a book on Kindle. It does give me scrolling but also means the behemoth Amazon has my reading history, and detailed stats, “4 minutes to finish this book.” So I’m not sure whose algorithm kept putting this title in my “look at this stack,” but I suspect, not unwelcome, collusion between the two.

Gentle chidding aside, with a grateful nod to the great Steve Martin, I wasn’t born a poor, black child. Cursory net search reveals the author isn’t black, either, but as a Japanese American (words on his site), I’m sure he faced a similar prejudice.

One of the first settings, a palatial rap residence, reminded me of a scene — a setting — in one of the Rule of Ten books.

But with an edge.

“If Snoop knew how much weed he was smoking he’d organize an intervention.” Page 114.

I think it was Walter Mosley, or maybe just Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Echos and reverberations. Echoes with an updated sense of noir.

Lots of exposition. Maybe lots of exposition, but the narrative itself rips right along, and the clues are all there, laid out in proper fashion.

Good? I don’t know, I wasn’t familiar with the author before this first book. Any good? About halfway through the novel, I popped out of the reader and over to the digital library and checked out Book 2 in the series. Finished the first one, checked it back in, and I was prepped to dive into the next.

Looking forward to see where this takes us.

IQ (book 1)

IQ – Joe Ide

IQ (An IQ Novel Book 1)