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Month: November 2018

Saturn

Published by Mary on November 4, 2018

Candle to Saturn

Saturn is central to my astrological chart—ruler of duty, constraint, control. Saturn conjuncts my moon, which books will tell you makes me melancholy and my emotions hard to express. Saturn also sits highest in my chart, nearest the zenith, making it the ruler of my career.

Despite Saturn’s reputation for constriction, he also rules the Saturnalia, when everyone trades places, servants become rulers, and we exchange gifts amid revelry. Saturn is king of the Golden Age, when no one needs to work and fruit falls from the trees.

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Off the edge

Published by Mary on November 3, 2018

I’m about halfway through the septet’s book two, which has the working title The Deer-Slayer, and I’m about to throw my characters off the edge.

There’s a dictum in fiction that you have to get your characters in trouble as quickly as possible. That’s the inciting incident—something that disturbs the life of your protagonist so that person takes a different track. This disruption falls at or toward the beginning and starts the mechanism of the narrative.

But there’s also that point where a trouble brewing all through the story finally boils. This isn’t the climax, but rather where the rising action (in terms of the five-act structure—exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement) kicks into gear.

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Rededication

Published by Mary on November 1, 2018

Small Hekate altarIt’s a blustery first of November. All morning, the cats have watched out the window as leaves fly by, wondering if the leaves are birds.

Hekate has been calling me back for reconnection. The mother of witches, she’s been with me since I was a young teen.

I didn’t know it then. I drew and painted then as often as I wrote, and one of my first big projects for my seventh-grade art class was a woodblock print. I made a traditional witch’s workroom—skulls, books, candles, cauldron. Out the window was a waning moon. In those days, any time I drew a moon freehand without thinking, it was waning.

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