Gripes of a Horoscope Writer

11.27.06


Allow me to vocalize my professional frustrations.

At times like these, when many of the planets bottleneck into an accumulation in one band of the zodiac, it makes my work a lot more troublesome.

Why? Because I end up feeling like a broken record, repeating the same themes over and over again in the horoscopes for each sign. (Hopefully, you haven't noticed. I do my damnedest to find fresh angles, or to rephrase.)

It's not my fault, though. I blame the planets, for hanging so close to one another, forcing us to focus on the one thing (or a variety of one-things that resemble each other) represented by whatever specially-overcrowded region of our chart is being triggered.

For instance, we recently had five (and, for a moment, up to six) planets in Scorpio at one time. (Read more about it here.)

When I write my horoscopes, I look at solar charts for each sign. A solar chart distributes all the signs to house placements around the wheel. Building a solar chart for, say, Taureans, I'd start by putting Taurus on the 1st house cusp… then continue to Gemini (the next sign after Taurus) on the 2nd, Cancer on the 3rd, and so on. The meanings I extrapolate for each horoscope are based on, among other things, which houses in a sign's solar chart are being transited by which planets. Make sense?

Well, when so many planets are in the same sign, it also means that, for each solar chart I construct, the whole batch of planets is also in the same solar house. So (continuing with the Taurus example) that explains why, week after week, Taureans have kept reading about relationships in my scopes. Because the super-Scorpio conglomeration was in their 7th house, which symbolizes our behaviors in one-on-one partnerships.

Anyway, back to me. How mind-addling it becomes, searching for creative ways of describing the same thing. Have you ever tried to fine-tune the intonations of a Mars in Scorpio, as differentiated from a Venus in Scorpio, Sun in Scorpio, and Mercury in Scorpio, all at the same time? (At least the Mercury was retrograde, giving me something else to discuss.) I suppose I could've just written, 'Things will be intense,' for every sign for several weeks in a row, and left it at that. But wouldn't you, my dear readers, have felt cheated?

Frankly, I'm bored of the same damn concentration of energy pushing down on me for weeks at a time. (Is that what fucked my back up?) I need variety already… and sure, I've gotten some, now that the Sun, Venus and Jupiter have moved on into Sagittarius.

Alas, December brings a different version of 'more of the same'—with Sagittarius substituting for Scorpio as 'the same damn concentration of energy'. Now you know why your next few weeks' horoscopes might all end up sounding alike. Blame the planets.