Thursday, Aug. 25, 2005 Continuing in the series of non-blogs as the week's astrology builds to a crescendo -- Mercury makes its last square to Mars, the Moon and the Sun are at last quarter, and Venus crosses the degree of the Oct. 3 solar eclipse -- all the same day. Today and Friday promise to be interesting days for the news, and also come with some personal revelations that help wrap up the mysteries of the past six or eight weeks. Today I'll be writing the Planet Waves essay. I still  have not figured out what to do. I will soon do a general piece on Virgo, I was thinking of doing Betty Dodson's chart on the occasion of her 76th birthday, and I have an idea for a book chapter about how people respond to astrology columns. I think I may do that, because it's been calling me. One of my plans for the fall is to rekindle the process of writing chapters in a book I started in the spring that a few agents said they liked. An easy way to do that is to run that in tandem with my other writing. I have done some of that -- but not quite enough to move things along. As you know, I always have the push to do something new, relevant in that moment, and to keep it fresh all the time...a good idea, if you're swimming in the lake of popculture...but the downside to that is that pieces quickly become about "past things." So to do this, I need to write pieces that are what's called timeless, not linked to a particular time; or linked to a time that comes up over and over, like Virgo, but made relevant for every year. I think that this would be a worthy experiment, if you're willing to go along with it. I would really like to see the Planet Waves book happen, but it's not going to be by accident -- it needs to be both intuitive and follow at least an idea-to-idea scheme. That means essays that work as chapters, and that may not have anything much to do with "now" in the obvious sense. So...in a moment I'll be pulling up my socks and heading out to my favorite writing haunt at Place de la Contrescarpe and see what comes up and out.