I’m in the throes of editing the author proofs for my book, and it’s painful. Over the years, I’ve perfected a rather obsessive writing process – dashing off a draft, printing it out, marking it up; typing in the changes, printing it out, marking it up; lather, rinse, and repeat as needed, often five or six times for a simple essay. One weeps for the trees, but I can’t seem to edit on the computer – I’ve got to see it on the page, cross things out, and shoehorn in barely-legible transitional phrases. It’s messy, but it works for me; with a 1,000 word essay, I can usually get the prose so tight you could bounce a quarter off it.
This is the process I used, more or less, when writing the book. But it simply wasn’t feasible to massage all fourteen sections of the book to the extent I would a single essay. So now, as I roam the pages I find mess after hot mess. I don’t blame my scrupulous editor or careful proofreader, because these are not the sorts of messes they would have been expected to catch or clean up. They’re messes of rhythm and word choice, meter and imagery. So I’m itching to scrawl all over every clean, cute page with my brand-new purple marker; but I restrain myself, because someone else has to be able to read my notes and I can’t just scrawl them in my usual haphazard fashion. And even after I’ve written in my neatly printed comments, I can’t be sure I’ve fixed something to my satisfaction because I can’t type in the new stuff and print it out in exactly the same format. I should have broken down in the beginning and taken the thing down to Kinkos and had a “mess” copy made for myself, then transferred everything over to the proofs in a sane, legible fashion.
Ack! I’m in mildly OCD, Saturn in Virgo hell. I can only work through a couple of chapters a day because I’m so tense as I read through it, waiting to find something intrinsically stupid and not-easily-fixable. It seems to fit the symbolism of transiting Saturn conjoining my natal Pluto, though I couldn’t explain exactly why.
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In other Saturn/Pluto news, I’ve been working with a hypnotherapist for a few weeks. He’s a fabulous fellow – he’s one of those November 1 birthday Scorpios I seem to magnetize, with his Sun, appropriately enough, conjoining my natal Neptune (and his, since he was born just a few months after me). Needless to say we click, and the hypnosis has been startlingly effective in altering some long-troublesome thought and behavior patterns. But it seems to work a bit like chiropractic, in that you make an adjustment and initially everything feels great, but then the shock of realignment freaks out the rest of the system and before you know it, you’re right back where you started. I’ll stay with it, though; it certainly seems like exactly the right work to do under the influence of Saturn/Pluto.
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Finally, I don’t know what cosmic noise to attribute this to, but doesn’t it seem like there’s a hell of a lot of horrendous torture imagery in the news and in film right now? Or am I feeling especially sensitive to it because of my own Saturn/Pluto situation? I’m sitting there last night watching, I don’t know, the Chappelle Show or something, and suddenly I’m presented with this nightmarish commercial for a movie about anesthesia… the gist seemed to be that the patients in the film aren’t actually asleep, just paralyzed during a surgical procedure? I can barely write about it, it freaked me out so profoundly. How, exactly, is this entertainment? Meanwhile, congress appears to be a stone’s throw away from officially endorsing torture by confirming Bush’s latest AG nominee/horror. What is it in our collective unconscious that’s rearing up and inflicting this violent cruelty and ugliness on the world? It’s not just Mars turning retrograde in the progressed US chart, because it ain’t just happening here.
Are any of you getting hit with a Saturn/Pluto
transit? What’s happening with you?
