on the new moon in aries and how to get momentum

📚 You can order a signed copy of my memoir Heretic through my local bookshop! Put in a comment if you want it extra-personalized!

⭐️ Calling all bad bitches with a book project who know that magic will help you get published: Book Deal Breakthrough, a ten-week intensive marrying the magical with the practical, starts Sunday, April 26th. Doors are open.

I’m on deadline for the astrology book, but my focus since wrapping up weeks of family-related travel has been my Novel WIP. Yes, I did just get notes back from my editors on the Mercury chapter, and yes, my Venus and Mars chapters are overdue, and yes, Astrology for Artists is the book I am actually under contract with a major publisher for.

But my novel draft is what has momentum. And if this week of historically significant Aries conjunctions has taught me anything, it’s the value of developing the kind of creative practice that can sustain momentum. Which brings us to today’s topic —

This turbo-charged New Moon is downright historical for the number of planets it is co-present with: responsible Saturn and dreamy Neptune, as we have discussed at length, but also the lunation’s ruler, the action star Mars, which is conjunct communicative Mercury — which is strongly encouraging of expression, to say the least.

Six planets in Aries. SIX! Plus minor planet Chiron, which if included in the tally brings us to a grand total of seven.

(Blessings and patience to the parents of all the children born this morning! World-changing Aries babies who will NOT be told what to do, coming to adulthood near you ca. 2044!)

This is to say —

*perhaps with the exception of the Mars-Saturn conjunction on Sunday, but more on that in the next week ahead —

Aries is bold, blunt, and brief, and so I shouldn’t be surprised that this newsletter wants to be, too. So let’s address what momentum IS and how you can chase (and cultivate) it in your creative practice.

First, the briefest of returns to high school science class: Momentum is mass in motion, or mass plus velocity. (Velocity being that most Aries of concepts!) A snowball rolling downhill gathers mass, which is to say it gets bigger, and this is the key part:

as it gets bigger, it goes faster.

Too often with writing, we neglect how size — how developing mass, which is not only word count but also your knowledge of the Story scope — is what actually facilitates speed.

Too many writers, especially new writers or writers returning to the page after years away, are prematurely discouraged by a lack of speed, which they mistake as the sole marker of success.

The starting of any story is, inevitably, the slowest part of the process. What is the story? How does it work? How is it shaped? Who the fuck are these characters? There are so many questions, so many unknowns that have to be figured out, and regardless of whether you’re an Outliner or a Discovery writer (or, like me, a mix of both), the archaeological stage of figuring out where to fucking dig is, by necessity, going to take time to develop any kind of velocity.

I have a particular vantage point on how velocity works, and how long it takes to get going, because I have been working on my novel for three and a half years.

I discussed this at length with my beloved Call Your Coven co-host in our episode on Witchcraft & Creative Writing — 

— how the early part of my writing process with narrative work (both the Novel and Heretic) looks like YEARS of what we might call Discovery Writing.

A timeline for you:

I got the idea for the Novel WIP in November 2022, about a month after Heretic came out (surprise surprise: once one book was out of my body, another one arrived). I fiddled around with it a bit, wrote a few scenes, took some notes, and mostly put it to the side as I worked on another book that I have since put in the drawer.

I didn’t revisit the Novel substantively until summer/fall 2023, at which point I wrote about 40,000 words into it, experimenting with structure and POV and one storyline that I have since entirely cut, before writing enough into the book that I knew enough of what it was to start over. Scrapped the whole thing; started from scratch.

2024, same process: wrote about 20 or 30k into it (hard to estimate when it’s all handwritten in notebooks and legal tablets!), scrapped it once I had Important Realizations, started from scratch.

Q1 of 2025 — same thing. Honestly, I wrote & scrapped so much over the last few years I am probably leaving a lot out.

Point is: the last few years had a LOT of stops and starts. It was not linear progress. There were weeks of manic drafting and months of just taking baths and listening to playlists. A lot of “oh, I know enough about the story now to know it is way too different from what I just spent months writing, so let’s start over.” Or “oh, that whole third POV storyline can just be cut” (that was my 2023!).

A LOT of people get discouraged in their version of this phase.

Too many talented writers quit due to their own disappointment or misconceptions about what “writing” looks like, forgetting that an Idea is not a Book and that Books usually take lots of time and effort to emerge.

But back to momentum, and how to nurture it. Here’s the thing you have to remember:

Each time I reset the story, I knew more than I had before writing those 20 or 30 or 40 or whatever thousand words.

Every reset happened because my knowledge of the story had deepened, my understanding of the foundation and structure had gotten stronger, my insight into and intimacy with my main characters had shifted for the better.

On the outside, the snowball looked like I was starting from scratch.

But that’s not entirely accurate, is it?

Size isn’t just word count. Size, or mass, is also knowledge and intimacy and RELATIONSHIP with the story (which is why I emphasize relationship so much at this newsletter!).

Every time I scrapped one version, I wrote the next version faster.

My experiments brought results — failures and breakthroughs — faster.

Which brought me to what the story NEEDED faster.

The try-fail cycle, also known as trial-and-error, or as research and development, is an ESSENTIAL part of the creative process — and one that is absolutely necessary to build the kind of momentum that actually finishes a (hopefully good) book.

Technically, the draft of the novel that I’m working on will be the “first” full draft of the story I’ve written. But spiritually and emotionally, that doesn’t feel true; I’ve already written my way into half a dozen other versions of this book. For as much as I still have to write, I know almost every single thing that happens.

It’s easier to see the finish line when you know where it fucking is.

(Incidentally, this is also why I’m not worried about the astrology book, because I know what every chapter looks like.)

Try-fail cycles are an essential part not only of creative practice but of how we conceptualize MOMENTUM.

So as we reflect on momentum and this New Moon and where in your life or creative practice you’re looking to nurture more of it, I’d like to invite you to not only think of momentum as how “much” you’re writing or even how “fast” you’re writing, but rather, to identify where you are in your own creative cycle.

(No, it doesn’t have to be pretty. Yes, use whatever materials you like.)

I’d like to invite you all to map your own try-fail cycle. Where do you start? Where do you end? What detours do you tend to take? What are the tools you use for each process? (e.g. I discovery-handwrite my way into story structure, and once I have more of an outline, I transcribe on my laptop — which may be when I realize I have to scrap it and start over!)

What does your creative process tend to look like? If it’s different depending on story type or medium, draw out your options. If you haven’t “finished” something you acknowledge as creative, map out the cycle up to the point where you tend to lose steam.

We aren’t judging our cycles for not looking like our favorite authors. We aren’t judging them for not looking how we think they “should” look (and where did you learn about those shoulds, anyway?). We are mapping our processes for what they are, that we might accept them and nurture what they can eventually be.

Thank you for reading Astrology for Writers. These Times are hard and attention spans are low, and I don’t take it for granted that you invite me into your inbox.