on money, respectability, and the pisces eclipse

Before we get into the eclipse —

If you’ve got a book project that you’re looking to make progress on and ~do powerful magic about~, then I’d like to invite you to join Book Deal Breakthrough, my 10 week intensive that blends the magical and the practical for FINALLY getting published. As one alum said, “I learned more in these ten weeks than I learned in my entire MFA.”

On the flip side, if you’re burned out and in desperate need of spiritual community and some more practical mindfulness throughout your month, then you will be more well served by The Grove’s Fall/Winter 2026-2027 cohort, which I co-moderate with my wife Meg Jones Wall of 3am.tarot. The most succinct way I can possibly describe The Grove is “the BEST home church group, but for witches.” It’s such a special space.

Registration for both closes on August 31st!

And now, for tonight’s eclipse. Whew boy.

Technically speaking, this eclipse is a full moon. It is the culmination of events since the New Moon in Pisces we had on March 18th earlier this year. Notably, that New Moon was the first Pisces lunation that had not been an eclipse in ages. Fitting, that tonight’s lunation marks the last eclipse of the entire Virgo/Pisces cycle.

Every Full Moon invites us to look back to what seeds were planting during the New Moon prior. Given this lunation’s role in the eclipse cycle, we are also invited to look back on previous lunar/full moon eclipses in Pisces, which occurred on September 17, 2024 at 26* Pisces and September 7, 2025 at 15* Pisces.

So I’m quite serious. Flip back in your calendar-keeping device and check out what you were doing on or around March 18, 2026, September 7, 2025, and September 17, 2024. I’ll wait. What were you writing? What were you scheduling? What were you worried about? What were you still thinking was going to work?

We’re gonna do some deep diving into the cycle this eclipse season has brought us through, and don’t worry — I’ll walk you through it even if you have no idea what it means for your chart.

For me, the Pisces eclipses have been about money.

But Jeanna, you say, EVERYONE is worried about money right now! And, yes. We are in the umpteenth recession of my adult life. No one gets out of capitalism without money stress or trauma.

But for me, Pisces is my second house that has to do with all things money, personal finance, income streams, inherited beliefs around money, and so much more.

And the last few years of eclipses have brought about significant changes in how I think about money and especially how I make it.

Those of y’all who’ve been around, or who have read my memoir Heretic, know that I grew up country poor. My daddy dug ditches for a living and hunted squirrel for dinner. As my wife’s mother once said to me, horrified: “You ate roadkill for dinner?” No; we ate what my daddy hunted, or what we got from neighboring farms, where my dad would help out his farmer friends in exchange for a freezer full of hog that would feed us for the winter. That kind of country poor.

(Not as poor as Dolly Parton, who was raised in a two-room cabin with no electricity or running water, although whenever she said that her family felt like they were doing fine because she never went hungry, I see my childhood self in a mirror, insisting that if we had something to eat, no matter that it was squirrel my mama had cleaned buckshot out of, then we couldn’t be poor, because poor people were starving, and we had kettle popcorn after dinner as a salty dessert, and no one who knew the joy of popcorn could possibly be poor.)

Fast forward a few decades, and you can see how, to a country girl whose biggest, most far-reaching dream as a child was simply going to college, my life now is something beyond my wildest dreams, simply by the fact that I’m here: that I started in the rural Midwest wearing hand-me-down clothes and getting all my books from the library and eating squirrel soup for dinner and now live in New York City in an apartment where my monthly rent (harrowing as it is) would have paid for a substantial chunk of the home I grew up in. I can walk into a bookstore and see a book that I wrote right there on the shelf.

That is wild.

That is the result of a Pisces second house: the “surely I can make a living doing what I love most” refusal to give up on a dream, however unrealistic — however many questionable, idealistically driven financial decisions put you deeper and deeper into debt. I can look back on my adult life and see plenty of places where I should have made more responsible financial decisions, where I could have bothered to learn about high yield savings accounts or that you actually had to invest money after opening a Roth IRA, but I am driven by the Jed Bartlet hope of “what’s next?”, too damn idealistic about what I can accomplish for my own good. (Although I usually end up accomplishing said dream. So.)

For me, these eclipses between my Pisces 2nd and Virgo 8th houses have involved getting very real about my money: cleaning up my act, eliminating all leaks, budgeting to hell. It’s very much an Astro Good that this final eclipse arrives just as I am — FINALLY! — almost debt free (barring my student loans, ugh) for the first time in my adult life. I can’t tell you what a relief this is and how much work I’ve done on myself behind the scenes to make that possible. Money. Is. Emotional. (The moon is our emotional body! It brings up FEELINGS about whatever area of life is getting eclipsed!)

I’ve also gotten very real with myself about how I want to be making money as a self-employed author and teacher. This 2024-2026 eclipse cycle has taught me so much about how to Cost-Benefit Analysis opportunities I have as a self-employed working artist.

Largely, this eclipse cycle taught me what streams of income don’t work for me.

Around that first Pisces eclipse in September 2024, I was recovering from a total hysterectomy; I was basically a couch potato for all of July and August 2024. After several years of years of surgeries and hospitalizations, my finances were absolutely decimated, and I was just starting to realize how much I needed to be focusing on opportunities that could get me off of credit cards and would build up my savings.

That September, Meg and I moved to Iowa for a month — I was teaching an advanced memoir writing class at my alma mater, Cornell College, which runs on the “One Course At A Time” schedule. I had been wanting to apply for more adjuncting jobs here in NYC and thought this would be a good way to test the waters.

Boy, was teaching current undergraduates a cold splash of water. The compensation barely paid for the bills I was still on the hook for in NYC. All told, counting airfare for both Meg and myself, it actually cost me money to take that Visiting Writer position, much as I loved getting to share Iowa with my wife (and getting so much in-person time with my friend Lyz Lenz, who is guesting for this cohort of Book Deal Breakthrough). Looks good on a CV; not practical for my reality.

A year later, around that Pisces eclipse in September 2025, I had much cause to celebrate: I’d sold Astrology for Artists earlier in the summer, and I was on the verge of celebrating Heretic’s paperback release, which had been a hard-fought battle with HarperCollins — but I was exhausted, burned out, and resentful.

Yes, I had sold an astrology book. Yes, I was getting to re-launch my first book. And I wanted to be working on my books. I wanted to be writing. But neither of those things were paying my bills. I was still broke. Still recovering from the decimation that is a Medical Crisis in the United States. I was seeing astrology clients 1:1 and running Showing Up to the Work co-working containers and barely breaking even.

Seeing clients, especially, was often the only thing my chronically ill body could do in a day; if it was a client day, there was no writing or thinking happening. If it was a client day, even with a client I loved, I had come to grudgingly accept that no writing would get done.

This was not sustainable in the long-term — not if I wanted to be working toward a career where writing books is, actually, my primary stream of income and where I spend the bulk of my time.

But what else to do? Rent waits for no one.

Cut to the New Moon in Pisces earlier this year (yes, we’re finally caught up; I have Mercury in Sagittarius and, icymi, extremely Midwestern, and I’ve never embraced brevity in my life). I had been intentionally brainstorming with the intention of creating an offering this year that would be as exciting and energizing to my students and clients as it was to me. That was what I wanted: to teach something that was wildly valuable to my students, that would ALSO energize me in a way that I could still go write at a coffee shop after leading a Zoom call.

Is this insane? Am I nuts for thinking people would want this? I asked my wife.

Is this too weird? Too witchy on main? Not serious enough? Am I gonna get laughed out of the next bookstore event I do? I asked my writer friends.

Is this too niche? I asked my witch-astrologer friends.

NO! was all of their resounding answer.

And whaddaya know: that first cohort of Book Deal Breakthrough, birthed through the Pisces eclipses and that extraordinary New Moon, was the most energizing thing I have done outside of writing in YEARS.

IT IS MY LITERAL FAVORITE WORKSHOP I HAVE EVER TAUGHT.

Meg couldn’t get over how much I was beaming at the end of every session. My friends were like, we haven’t seen you this excited in years. I was high on my students’ breakthroughs and wins — I think the scream I let out when Claire emailed me that she got an agent was heard across all of New York City.

And I was encouraged by the number of industry pros — including my decidedly NOT-a-witch-or-astro-girlie agent — who immediately said YES WE WANT TO COME VISIT AND TALK TO YOUR STUDENTS THIS IS SO COOL ACTUALLY?

That’s the thing about eclipses: when you lean into them, the eventual breakthrough is unlike anything you could ever have imagined.

Now, let’s take a beat and check in with you and the Pisces part of your chart — 

Depending on your rising sign, this eclipse (and all Pisces lunations before it) will land in a part of your chart having to do with the following topics:

Take a moment to write down or think about what themes or issues these areas of life have brought up for you since 2024. Here’s a refresher on the dates of the previous Pisces eclipses, and then also the New Moon this year (not an eclipse, but still connected to tonight’s moon):

What were you writing, or wanting to write?

What art were you making, or wanting to make?

What were you scheduling or obligated to? What were you worried about? What were you still thinking was going to work? What did you resent?

And what have you let go of? What has changed? What do you know now that you didn’t know then?

How are you moving forward? What plans are you making based on your experience of these last years?

An important piece to consider for tonight’s eclipse:

Tonight’s moon is applying to an opposition with Mercury in Virgo and a square to Uranus in Gemini.

This is the literal energy of a breakthrough. Of an idea arriving. Of a story that has to be told, and you’re the one to tell it.

So if you’re in a place of discouragement, don’t fret — something new is coming down the pipe. Trust it.

“I’m a writer, so I can only teach creative writing.”

“I’m an astrologer, so I have to see clients 1:1.”

“I’m a writer and an astrologer and literature is serious and occultism is the butt of the joke so I can’t possibly combine them.”

Those self-limiting beliefs weren’t even conscious, not exactly, but these Pisces eclipses have sure brought them to the surface in unavoidable ways (along with the classic “I’m just not good at money / I grew up poor and I’ll always be in debt”).

I wish I could go back to still-recovering-from-a-hysterectomy Jeanna in 2024 and tell her that she can make a living teaching publishing AND witchcraft, actually. I wish I could tell her that as big as she thought she was playing, she was still playing small, because she was playing by industry rules and trying to succeed within the confines of a pre-determined path.

I wish I could tell her about high yield savings accounts. Alas.

But I can tell her now — and you can tell your past self your good news now, too.

P.S. Book Deal Breakthrough is my 10-week workshop that blends magical ritual with practical planning, for writers who want to get published in a way that’s both smart and soulful. It will run from September 13th to November 15th this fall.

Book Deal Breakthrough is a high-touch 10-week intensive that includes:

Book Deal Breakthrough is $2250, or 3 monthly payments of $750.

Registration closes August 31st.