Every year during the creation of the annual edition — a months-long project with a word count exceeding 60,000 — I reach the first real turning point: the short edition is written.
Really the January monthly horoscope, the short edition of the annual is about 350 words per sign, as opposed to the much more elaborate long edition. It’s a sample of the full reading, as if created in miniature; though as fully-thought-through a 12-sign entity, it stands alone as a piece of astrology writing. And it’s always great to get that one together, providing a boost of confidence that I’m actually going to get the job done.
The 12-sign part is vital to Sun-sign astrology because it’s about thinking fully once around the wheel, which is the key to doing astrology at all, especially for the public. Unlike most activities in the practice of a consulting astrologer, doing Sun-sign work one takes the same charts and reads them from the perspective of all the signs; over and over again. After a while the signs take on an absolutely equal quality, with any bias or favoritism having disappeared into the mists of history.
Drafts of the 12 longer sign articles are in various stages: some are advanced, some are merely researched, many are in first draft format; I am actually a bit ahead of the usual schedule in that regard, though I’m taking as few chances as possible given that I’ll be finishing the project through Mercury retrograde, Mars retrograde and two eclipses. (Those events are covered in detail in an earlier article, Winter Whirl.)
As for the short edition: I have to prune it back a bit today; my editor at Chronogram is waiting. I’m about 500 words over count, so I’ll be saving the old, hairy edition in case there are are any extra ideas in there that might get snipped; and then clean up the draft. That will be distributed to Cosmic Confidential and Planet Waves subscribers on the winter solstice as the January monthly horoscope.
For now: up, up and away.
commenting on my own article: well, that took another day of editing and I’m not sure I’ve got it. I’m a lot closer. For me the rewriting process is a rethinking process. I don’t know how this works for you, but for me one side of the process drives the other. Word count stands at 4404 – I love the numerology of text statistics.