✨ SOME NEWS ✨ Pre-orders for my forthcoming book, Heretic: A Memoir, are here! It comes out October 25th of this year, quite literally on an eclipse, which I’ll be sure to process with you all at a later date. Pre-orders are tremendously helpful for both first week sales and also for indicating to the publisher (in this case, HarperCollins) that there is a wide ranging audience.
tl;dr, pre-orders are incredibly important. You can find Heretic at your local indie bookstore, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, or wherever you most like to buy your books.
And now, for the New Moon in Pisces.
Xx,
Jeanna
It’s official: I’m in line edits on my book. We’re close to the end of the editorial process, where my editor is doing line-by-line edits to clarify the language and tell me where my ex-academic ass is just repeating myself over and over.
To be in line edits at last, after the essential but also sometimes excruciating six months of developmental edits, where I wrung every last bit of emotional give out of myself and onto the page, is a relief. For me, a more clearly aesthetic edit is much quicker and cleaner. Perhaps it’s not like that for everyone. But I feel decisive about which words sound like me, and which do not.
However, these edits also have me feeling rather like Cinderella, frantically picking lentils out of the ashes before the ball. Have I done enough? Will it be pretty, at the end?
That’s the thing about line edits (and those damn lentils): there’s always going to be something more you could have done, something obvious you missed.
It’s a curious, detail-oriented part of the creative process to be in during expansive Pisces season.
*
The New Moon in Pisces arrives on March 2nd at 12:34p Eastern. The last new moon of the zodiacal year, this marks the liminal where we are holding space for the transition from winter to spring. Where we are witnessing the world rise in its abundance after a slumber.
This moon sits close to its ruler, Jupiter, which is empowered in its home sign of Pisces. Jupiter is our healer-teacher, a bringer of faith in hard times that insists on a kind of possible goodness and even holiness. This New Moon holds the kind of energy that harkens back to Martin Luther King Jr.’s claim that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
There is a significant kind of optimism available here — perhaps even an unexpected or surprising one, with a sextile to rebellious Uranus involved — but it’s loaded with creative potential.
The key with Jupiter-packed Piscean energy, of course, is that you have to use it. Activate it. Lest it fizzle out. These things don’t just happen.
*
Scour the internet today, and you will find plenty of astrologers saying that new moons are a time to plant seeds. Hell, I’ve said it often enough. The thing is, there is a New Moon every single month. Which means that cycles end up being concurrent. There’s a lot of overlap.
There are seeds that you have already planted.
There are seeds that you are tending.
There are seeds that have already grown, that are approaching harvest (we have a full moon in two weeks!).
There are the seeds that you are bringing forth right now.
There are seeds you are sitting on, that may take years to be birthed.
It’s all in the timing.
In the English language, creativity is often used as a noun, or an adjective to describe a process. I’m a creative person rather than I create. But when you look at the Latin root, creatus, you see that it’s related to the verb creare, or, “to bring forth.”
To bring forth those seeds, those ideas inside of you.
It is interesting to me that the Latin root of creativity is also related to the Roman name for the goddess Demeter, which was Ceres. She ruled agriculture, fertility, the harvest, and the natural cycles that it’s so easy to forget our own creativity is going through.
As we’ve discussed on many occasions, cycles aren’t just constant production. How many of us are creating new things every two weeks, honestly? Cycles can be times of rest, too. It’s important to notice which one you’re in. “Using” the moon’s energy doesn’t have to mean starting a new novel or story; it can simply mean engaging mindfully and reflecting on where you are in this moment.
There is abundance available in this New Moon for the seeds you may want to plant — but there is also more than enough Piscean water to help sustain you if you are in a season where you are already creating or are simply resting. Perhaps, instead, planting a seed for where you are exactly in this moment. Releasing the inner striving. Honoring the creation that is.
Writing Prompts for the New Moon in Pisces
What part of your life feels dehydrated, thirsty — in need of some water, rejuvenation?
What part of the creative cycle are you in? If you’re working on different projects, where are you at in each of the projects? How do you feel about those different stages? Is it more comfortable for you to be in one stage or another? Why or why not?
Where in your creative life could you use some hope and/or faith?
If you read this newsletter and want to help it grow (and support my work!), consider becoming a paid subscriber. The subscription includes a detailed guide to every month’s upcoming astrology and how it impacts writers. Best days to pitch or revise? It’s all in there. It also includes specialty newsletters on planetary events like major ingresses, Mercury Retrograde, and more.