Writers write.

At least that’s what my tutors tell me.  And to a large extent they’re right.  But writing alone will never be enough to make me a real writer.

To be a real writer, I must be brutally honest about how I write and more importantly why.

Achieving such self-understanding isn’t easy.  That’s why writers so often warble on about everything else but themselves.   Fiction is easier to write than memoirs.  The world out there is far more interesting (and less scary) than the world within.

Yet readers read me (or not) because – as a person – I bring something new to their table.   Readers are perfectly capable of seeing and describing the world around them.  What they want from me – as a writer – is a new pair of eyes.

To understand what I have to offer my reader, I must look to my 1^st house.

My ascendant (cusp of 1^st house) is my door to the world.  If it has rose coloured glass, my world is rosy.  If that glass is grey, my world is full of gloom and doom.

I have Cancer rising with Uranus (cool and detached) conjunct my ascendant.   Cancer is supposed to be the most emotional of the zodiac signs.

So when my work was constantly rejected because it lacked emotion, I was understandably confused.

My Gemini Moon (ruler of my Cancer ascendant) is buried deep in my 12^th house (the unconscious).   I already understood that I saw the world through the eyes of a little girl who was terrified her mother would stop loving her.  Plenty of emotion there.

Yet what I’d not grasped is that because of my mother’s inconsistent behaviour toward me (thanks to Uranus), I’d learned to put emotional distance between myself and my world.  One minute my mother was hysterically breaking a hairbrush over my bottom for some ‘sin’ I’d not committed; the next she was contentedly curled up beside me with a book of fairy tales.   As a small child, was I to make of that?

For me – the message was clear enough – stay rational – skip the messy stuff – and then folks will like me.

But they won’t read me.