This is the third article in a series of four about my personal experiences as an avid follower of my own daily horoscope.

Since Sapphire Star Publishing released The Quintessential Gemini in June 2012, I have often been asked if I am the main character, Katherine Dale. In this fun, romantic tale Katherine  lives her life according to her daily horoscope – as you can imagine that isn’t an ideal way to go through life, but it makes for an amusing story! Whilst I do follow my own horoscope – let’s say, avidly – I do not live my life according to what I read. How can you? It rarely gives something as obvious as an answer to a problem, but it does give an indication of when the planetary alignments are favourable. If you  have a big decision to make, then why not time it so that any good karma being sent out by the universe is a natural boost?

If you want to catch up with the other three articles in this series – article 1, article 2, article 4.

So, just how relevant and meaningful are those astrological forecasts? Here are some actually forecasts and what was happening in a particularly unusual time of my life – major changes were afoot!

Gemini, Saturday, 29 May 2010

Your Week Ahead: You don’t have to have a plan. You just have to have an intention. Right now, if you want to protect your sanity you must stop trying to persuade yourself that everything is ‘supposed to be’ a particular way. Things are as they are. Whether that’s good or bad, there’s only a very small amount that you can change through the sheer force of your will. The change you want will come when the cosmos is ready to bring it to you. That doesn’t mean you should forget about what you really want. You should keep your eyes open at all times for chances and seize them when they arise. Until or unless they do, don’t worry about them.

Real life: The truth was I was writing manuscripts (by then I had four completed and was part-way through no. five) and I had no master plan.  At the beginning of December 2010 I was offered a chance to take part in a free trial of an online tutorial on how to set up a website by a friend of my son’s.  When I couldn’t even get the initial password to work to access the tutorial I felt like a failure. I also had to set up a Twitter Account and join Facebook… I felt out of my depth and alone.  My debut novel was released in February 2011 to a flurry of sales that took it to no. 12 on Amazon.co.uk. No one knew me of course, but my forecasts continued to reassure me to keep going.  At times I felt I was re-inventing the wheel and I began linking up with other, even newer, writers and sharing the little knowledge I had learned.  It seemed crazy everyone going through the same painful learning curve and I kept thinking ‘what a waste of time, people could share knowledge acquired to allow them to concentrate on writing!’

Fast forward to the start of a new year:

Gemini, Monday, 24 January 2011

It’s going to be a good week. You will reach a new understanding and become more comfortable about a situation that has lately seemed awkward and disturbing. Meaningful exchanges will deepen the level of communication between you and the people who matter most to you. Non- verbal interaction will count for as much, if not significantly more, than conversation and dialogue. At a very profound and important level, a delightful bridge is being built and sooner or later, an important secret will be shared.

Real life:  January 2011 was a turning point for me.  I had by then met a lot of new writers via social media, some at the very start of their learning curve and some way ahead of me.  I began blogging about a support network Women Following Their Dream on my website.  It had lots of hits, but few came forward.  However, it was an idea that I couldn’t let go.  One of the new writers I made contact with online, Kit Domino, lived quite close to me and we met up for lunch.  We discussed the possibility of getting new writers together, perhaps by forming a lunch club and by then I had identified a list of names from people I’d met online and I began reaching out to them. Some ignored my emails, others didn’t understand…. words alone weren’t moving things forward and my stars were right, but I needed help and guidance…

Gemini, forecast for the month of June 2011

Your Monthly Forecast: There is nothing ordinary or normal about the situation you now face. If you can’t yet see what’s so special about it, keep watching and thinking. Somewhere in your world, an amazing coincidence is occurring. It is as significant as it is almost uncanny. Maybe, you can understand what I mean by all the above but you’re not at all convinced that any of it is good. Stay calm. June’s rare, powerful alignments insist that, whether or not you like what’s going on, it can’t be happening by accident.

Real life:  It quickly became clear to me that pushing forward to bring a group of new writers together to share knowledge and mutually support had to offer a real benefit.  The idea of setting up a website was one I kept putting off – I seriously doubted I had the skills to pull it off. I also realised this was going to be a huge responsibility if I took it on. I kept mulling it over in my head, but it was such a big step. I’d recently been introduced to meditation by medium and psychic Richard Holmes, it was during a meditation session that it all became clear. Everything seemed to be pushing me in the direction of setting up a group website. I didn’t have the skills, but even so I decided during that ‘session’ of enlightenment that I would begin looking at potential website templates. If I found one that felt ‘right’ I’d take that as a sign and worry about how I would do it later…

I wasn’t being guided solely by the current forecasts, in June 2010 I had commissioned a full birth chart reading that spanned the next ten years. When I first received it I was over-whelmed by the detail but gradually I worked through the massive document. It not only confirmed virtually everything from the daily, weekly, monthly forecasts but took it much deeper. At first I just could not believe much of what I was reading. As if it was someone else’s life and had no impact on my own. And yet all of the parts where my nature, personality traits and foibles were described, were spot on! There was no doubt at all that what I am is a true Gemini and that the planetary alignments at my birth still had influence over my life and my destiny:

Uranus Squares Mars
This transit of Uranus will find you will be entering a period when expressing yourself becomes very important. Vital Mars and impulsive Uranus combine to inject you with flashes of energy that simply must make their mark in the world. During this period you will have at your disposal much larger amounts of energy with which to assert yourself. Now you will be able to do things that you thought you would never have dared to do. You will be able to make yourself heard too amongst people with whom you would not usually associate. Freedom and the right for you to do as YOU want for a change will become of paramount importance to you.

Me? Putting my own interests first, rather than that of family and friends? Really? Well, something major was going to have to happen to steer me along that path….

We have a comment from a lovely lady who Emailed to say:

 “I have always struggled to make any sense of my forecasts, however that has never stopped me reading them!  After I read your first post I decided to check out my previous month’s forecast rather than going straight to the new monthly one.  Wow!  When I initially read it I had thought ‘what a load of rubbish,’ it said I was going to be doing some travelling and I knew there was no chance of that for financial reasons.  About a week ago my daughter rang to say both of my grandchildren had chicken pox and could I pop down to Devon to help out.  My husband decided to come too and that’s where we are now.  I had totally forgotten about the forecast and smiled after I re-read it.  Now I’m hooked – it’s retrospective forecast reading for me from now on!” Liz, Bristol.

Well, that Email did make me smile … thanks for visiting!

Following on from where I left off in (other articles in this series first article, third article, forth article) this is where I’m going to compare real-life to what my horoscopes said, retrospectively. Quick re-cap: I had given up my full-time job due to a family emergency, suddenly I had time on my hands before I re-joined the employed.  I began writing while I sorted out my late mother’s estate, but it was really only something to keep me sane during a difficult time – writing was a dream for later in my life!

I had completed my first manuscript and a hardcopy was sitting in a box beneath my desk.  It was also filed neatly in a folder on my PC desktop ‘Linn’s Written Work’.  I had already started manuscript no. 2, but every time I logged on that little folder jumped out at me.  So I pulled out a one inch square of paper I had cut out of a newspaper more than fifteen years earlier, and Googled the publisher.  They were still in business and I looked up their submission details.  Twenty-four hours later my synopsis and sample chapters were in their Inbox.  Two days later I received an Email asking me to send them a hard copy of the full manuscript.  This was my forecast for that day:

Gemini, Tuesday, 19 January 2010

Time is not only a great healer; it is a great magician. The passage of time can bring about the most amazing transformations. Sometimes, though, you have a rather difficult relationship with time, not least because of your tendency to lead your life at a hectic pace. Others cannot always multi-task – or think about as much at once, as well as you can. You are now hoping that a dream can come true soon. It can, and it probably will come true – but you should still be thinking in terms of months not weeks.

Real life:  The healing referred to was the grieving process following my mother’s unexpected death in March 2009.  It was a thread running through my forecasts as that time.  In truth I felt a bit like a rudderless boat – I often found myself going to pick up the phone to ring her and ask her advice about what I should do.  Then I would remember and each time it hit me like a cold slap. The problem was that I had no reason to believe it was sensible to spend my days writing –how on earth did you get into print (ebook wasn’t even in my vocabulary then)?  I had begun talking to old contacts about prospective job opportunities and had already been offered a finance role.  For some reason I kept putting off making a decision.  In the meantime, I sent off my full manuscript – a stack of over five-inches of A4 paper, double line spaced – I was handing over my baby…

My husband said the decision was mine – my mother wasn’t on the end of the phone to ask, friends would say the same as Lawrence.  Of course, no one understood my ‘sudden’ passion for writing, it was something that surprised and shocked most people as it was the hidden side of me.  So how could anyone help me evaluate the next step? This is what my stars were saying:

Gemini, Thursday, 21 January 2010

There is an old Middle Eastern saying, ‘Trust in God, but tie your camel.’ That is good advice. We might also say, ‘Plan for the future, but make the most of today.’ The two priorities need not be mutually exclusive as long as you remember that, if you decide that you have to let something go here and now, so that you can enjoy the benefit there and then, you must do it with good grace. There is nothing wrong with a compromise, as long as it does not become a sacrifice. Be wholehearted today, and be wise.

Real-life: The ‘sacrifice was giving up a full-time income (and feeling guilty about that), I decided to take my private pension early.  It meant I still felt I was making some contribution whilst I ‘discovered’ myself… 

Gemini, Friday, 22 January 2010

Some say that it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do it wholeheartedly. That’s nonsense. If you do something silly, unkind or selfish, it hardly matters how much enthusiasm and sincerity you muster. It is, though, fair to say, that even if you do something wise, generous and selfless, you will have problems if you act in a spirit of resentment. You do need to put your heart and soul into this weekend’s undertaking.

Real-life: This was the weekend I finally bit the bullet and made the decision.

To put this into perspective, at that time my forecast for the year ahead from the astrologer I follow daily (a) and another astrologer I consult from time to time (b), were saying:

a)Gemini, Year Ahead 2010

The real question is not, what is this year going to bring? It is, what is this year not going to bring any more of? As we get further into this next phase of opportunity and challenge, it will become clear that something really is moving you away from feeling perpetually engaged in a struggle to which you must give your all*.  New possibilities will reveal themselves, and it will be clear that circumstances have begun to alter and your attitude has changed, too. Nothing need bother you like it did. There will still be issues. You may still face seemingly impossible dilemmas. But none of it will matter to you as much as you once thought it did. You’ll enter a world where there is more love, more wealth, more relaxation and more comfort. Comfort is a funny thing. We don’t necessarily look to our astrologer to tell us when we will be comfortable. We want to be told about ‘attractive strangers’, journeys over water or unexpected windfalls. But you don’t need any of that to make you comfortable and happy. You just need to know that what you have got on your plate is something that you can digest and that will prove good for you. In 2010, something good is coming your way and it will keep on coming throughout the year. So no matter what you feel intimidated by, look again. Look into yourself. Into who you are. Into what you came here for. Into what you might be able to achieve if you were really to set your heart on it and really to get a fair shot at it. Life is about to give you a real way forward, bringing great enjoyment and fulfilment.

 *My mother’s sudden illness was tough, but I had also been actively supportive when my Aunt died in 2003 and my father in 2004 – both involved daily hospital visits and ‘vigils’ towards the end.  The years between 2004 and my mother’s death in early 2009 were equally tough because although there were no significant outward signs, I ‘felt’ something was terribly wrong and sometimes the worry was overwhelming.  After she died we found out she had been diagnosed with Leukaemia shortly after my father died, but had chosen not to have treatment. Quite simply she’d had enough, but it was five years of intense, draining worry for me and my family began to think I was paranoid as I kept saying something was very wrong, although I had no proof.

b) Gemini Year Ahead 2010

Get ready to see yourself in a whole new light, dear Gemini. Some rather vast and important shifts will take place unexpectedly in your life between now and when a series of eclipses ends in May 2013. You are setting the template for many years to come, but you may not have any clue that all this is about to happen so soon! An exciting and new path will open up for you to investigate.

Your attitudes or opinion may do a surprise shift in a new direction, or an opportunity you never expected to come up may materialize, and when it does, it will change everything you assumed. Gemini is very quick, breezy energy, so whatever this eclipse brings will happen fast. Eclipses never give you what you assume it will bring – it’s always something different, but in the case of a friendly eclipse, that might be quite exciting.

Gemini rules communication, including writing (books, magazines, Internet blogs, screenplays, journalism, cell phone and computer apps, poetry, inspiration, documentary work – you name it), as well as lecturing and speaking, editing, teaching, marketing, translations of work into different languages, copywriting, advertising, publicity, TV production and programming, telecommunications, research, and sales of every description. One of these areas may become very important to you now when a breakthrough opportunity comes your way.
 

This is where looking at your forecasts with hindsight can turn something that felt rather unlikely at the time, into something rather insightful!  I made the decision not to return to work – to let go of my ‘old’ life and my small pension made me feel at least I was still making a contribution.  On 13 December 2010 I set up this website – my debut novel was due out in February 2011 and I had to establish my author platform very quickly.  I joined Twitter and Facebook also in December 2010.  When I read the yearly forecast b) at the beginning of the year I totally dismissed it out of hand.  If someone had told me I would have an Internet Blog set up before the end of the year, I would have laughed hysterically and then said ‘I have absolutely no idea what that involves!’  My next post will explain the ‘coincidence’ that allowed me to learn the skills I needed very quickly …

I will be telling you all about that and sharing some more forecasts with you in my next post.  Thank you for joining me and if you want to ‘join’ in and tell me about your own experiences drop me a line at lbhalton@googlemail.com!

Okay – horoscopes are fun, but what if you take them a little more seriously?

This is a series of four articles about my personal experiences as an avid follower of Jonathan Cainer’s astrological forecasts.This is the third article (links to article 2, article 3 and article 4)  Since writing The Quintessential Gemini (published by Sapphire Star) in which Katherine Dale lives her life according to her daily horoscope, I’ve been asked many times over ‘is Katherine YOU?’ Well, acquainting myself with what the stars forecast for me IS a part of my daily life, courtesy of Jonathan Cainer. However, I don’t live my life according to my horoscope forecast as is the case with Katherine Dale. But it did give me the idea for a novel that is rather amusing! 

Maybe fact is stranger than fiction though ….

My own sun sign is Gemini – but what we must all remember is that whilst we share with everyone born under the same sign certain traits, we are each unique. Everyone will have all 12 signs of the zodiac and all 10 planets in their horoscope – it’s the order of things that makes each chart unique. Later in this series I will talk about the differences I found when I had a personal chart reading based on my exact time and place of birth.

For the last couple of years I have kept copies of my daily, monthly and yearly forecasts as they have been updated. It’s a sort of experiment if you like, as I’m going through a time in my life when I don’t really have a master plan for the future – I’m taking each day as it comes. Now that’s pretty scary for someone who has always organised every single aspect of their life and enjoys achieving targets!

In June 2010 – a year after the start of an ongoing period that would change my life beyond belief and even my wildest dreams (and continues to do so), I commissioned a full birth chart that is still being played out. The level of accuracy is astounding, as I’m told my life as such is an unusual one for a Gemini. The changes that I’ve experienced since the beginning of 2009 have taken me in a totally new direction and have led me to acquire skills I never dreamed I’d need.

I believe coincidences and luck are not random things that happen and I have found that my forecasts constantly give me advance warning as each new step (or coincidence) takes me along this new path I find myself travelling. It began towards the end of 2008 when my forecasts started to hint at a growing interest in the esoteric things in life and then came references to a major change in direction for me that would give vent to my creative side – writing a book was one example given. At that time I remember laughing and thinking ‘one day, not for quite a few years though …’

Like most writers I knew from an early age I wanted to write, but I also ‘knew’ that it would be later in life when family demands weren’t pressing. When I did begin writing in 2009 many will say it was down to a series of coincidences. For most writers, financial constraints dictate that you can’t simply give up a good career to begin writing – and at that stage all I had written was some poetry, short essays and reams of notes with various ideas for full-length stories. Fate engineered a pressing need for me to walk away from my job to look after my mother, but she died very unexpectedly three months later. It then took me another six months to sort out her affairs and to give me a ‘break’ away from the distressing tasks I had to do, I spent a few hours each day writing.

My next post is going to quote actual forecasts from around that time time, by two different astrologers. Of course I had no idea whether I would ever be able to write a complete manuscript and had given no thought to what came afterwards – that’s the problem with having a dream! I had left behind the second (and more personally satisfying) career I’d had in my life, Interior Design, my first career had been in finance – so I assumed once I had sorted everything out I would go back to work. Writing was, therefore, simply an interlude. That was when I decided to keep the forecasts to re-read them in the future when I could really evaluate them meaningfully. The stars were predicting major changes in my life, things I couldn’t really comprehend or even imagine happening. This was going to be a test and would probably change forever the way I regarded astrological forecasts in the future.

Do you read you own forecasts regularly? Do you look at them occasionally? If you would like to share something that can be discussed here, I’d be thrilled if you would Email me at lbhalton@googlemail.com.

It still surprises me though, that my love of following what the stars say sparked the idea for The Quintessential Gemini. That’s the fun thing about life, ideas seemingly come from nowhere and this idea came from

the daily horoscope I receive on my Blackberry every night before I go to sleep. As I lay in bed one night reading what was in store for me the next day, I thought ‘What if someone really did try to live their life according to their daily horoscope?’ In the rose-tinted picture in my head of when I found time to write, it was always straightforward romantic stories – life, love and relationships. It had never crossed my mind to include astrological connections or a psychic theme. That’s where fate, and therefore, the stars decided to take me….