Alternate First Chapter of Child of Aokigahara

The Child of Aokigahara is written exclusively from Edgar's point of view. During one of my drafts, I tried an experiment wherein I wrote the first ten chapters from Aletheia's point of view. Check out the first chapter. It gives a different perspective as well as revealing information that didn't make it into the book.

The Ascendant In The Child of Aokigahara

In astrology, the ascendant is the face we show to the world. Determined by one's precise birth time, it's similar to Jung's persona, and is the way we think we should be. It also colors our perspective on things, and can suggest the outlook we have on life. If the sun sign is our core and the moon our automatic behavior, then the ascendant would be our self-image. To delve more deeply into this, I will explore the ascendant of three characters from The Child of Aokigahara: Aletheia, Edgar and Elijah.

Aletheia has a Pisces ascendant. As an Aries Sun, she's fiery and headstrong but with a temper. Her Virgo moon lends her to worrying, being critical and being analytical. But the Pisces ascendant gives one a self-image that is much more emotional and fluidic. Pisces ascendant people tend to idealize others, often putting them up on a pedestal and feeling shattered when they can't stay on. They're compassionate, but can easily fall into self-pity and can be quite unrealistic. In Aletheia's case, she has a strong urge to seem like a caring and sensitive person, but as we see in The Child of Aokigahara, she needs to embrace her fiery Aries core.

In Edgar's case, he has an Aquarius ascendant. His own desired self-image is very different than the one that we see. He wants to seem airy and intellectual, full of new and lofty ideals, humanitarian without getting terribly involved. However, Edgar's core is Pisces, and as we see again and again, the self-pity and escapist tendencies of his Sun sign run deep. His Moon is in Scorpio, which is a very emotionally intense and turbulent placement, so Edgar doesn't have much luck convincing the world that the image he would like to have of himself is the reality.

Elijah has a Scorpio ascendant. People with Scorpio ascendant can often be very brooding and emotional, but in a more private and restrained way than you find with Pisces. They also seek to go deep into the mysteries of life, transforming themselves and transforming others. Regardless, he has a need for absolute transcendence. In Elijah's case, he has both a Scorpio Sun and Scorpio ascendant. His core and his desired self-image are one and the same. It also means these qualities are much more powerful in him. His moon is in Aquarius, which for Elijah has been useful in providing objectivity and self-control, but also fuels the deep reserve of his Sun and ascendant.

To see how these play out, check out The Child of Aokigahara, available in print and on Kindle.

Second Book Published

The long awaited sequel to Collywobbles, The Child of Aokigahara, is now out! Find it on Amazon here.

The Moon Sign

The Moon sign changes every 2.5 days, going through all twelve of the signs in a month. It, along with the ascendant, accounts for many of the differences between people of the same sign, even if born in the same year. The Moon sign rules your past, what you need,  and your innate sense of self. It rules the relationship we had with our mother, how we experienced nurturing and how that experience influences our feelings and attitudes today. It impacts how secure or insecure we feel and also how we nurture others.

My first fictional case study is of The Girl With the Collywobbles protagonist, Aletheia. Aletheia has a Virgo Moon and Aries Sun. A Virgo Moon often manifests as a worrying and cautious personality that overanalyzes situations, themselves and their relationships. They can be critical and fault-finding but also analytical, and they need to guard against developing a martyr complex. This is in marked contrast to her Aries sun sign, which is associated with such qualities as being headstrong, impatient, impulsive and even reckless. Because her sun sign is so different from her moon sign, she experiences an inner conflict between risk-taking and caution. In Aletheia, this manifests as a tendency to take action but analyzing after the fact and sometimes becoming self-critical if that action was foolish or violated her values in some way.

My second fictional case study is of our male lead, Edgar. Edgar has a Pisces Sun and Scorpio Moon. Scorpio Moon people tend to be very intense emotionally. They need to be deeply involved in whatever they're doing and relationships are of absolute importance. Any strong Scorpio placement makes one fascinated by others' emotional motivations as well as their own, but they can also be jealous and possessive, reacting strongly to feelings of betrayal. Sometimes the desire for emotional intensity is so strong that they create drama unnecessarily, and if done to the extreme, this can result in scenarios that create those same feelings of betrayal and disappointment. In Edgar's case, he has a Pisces Sun, already a highly emotional placement. Pisces tend to be moody, sensitive, empathetic, and fantasizing. They're prone to self-pity and are often very escapist. The combination of the two makes for an extremely emotional person, but because of Edgar's Pisces sun, he tries to escape the intense emotions through drug abuse. This, of course, creates more problems than it solves. As the Moon is representative of what one needs, what he needs to be doing is using his Scorpio Moon to probe deeply into his own motivations and to develop a greater sense of his private self.

As you can see, whether the Moon sign is characteristically similar or markedly different from the Sun sign, it presents challenges. It's what we need, but that need is often trumped by our Sun sign. In my opinion the Moon sign is really the most psychoanalytic element of astrology. It's through that where we can see what is really driving us, how we reacted to our early childhood experiences and why we react emotionally the way that we do now.

Next: the ascendant

What I've been working on

I'll be doing a post on the moon signs in the near future. I’ve been hard at work getting my next book, The Child of Aokigahara, ready to come out. It takes place five years after The Girl With the Collywobbles, and includes yokai, yurei, and telepathy. 

My husband is designing the cover and so he wants me to come up with a synopsis. I find this to be the hardest part about writing (well, aside from marketing) but this is a rough draft I came up with somewhere around my third drink last night:

The second book in the series, The Child of Aokigahara marks the beginning of a new arc. It’s five years after the end of The Girl with the Collywobbles and Aletheia is on a reality tv show in Japan, chasing yokai. One day, she and Edgar have a romantic afternoon in Suicide Forest, resulting in her unexpected pregnancy. From that point on, she starts having nightmares and telepathically spying on Edgar’s most humiliating secrets while yokai torment him on all of their shoots. As the paranormal phenomena escalate, Edgar begins to suspect something is deeply wrong. He realizes that their only hope is to leave Japan, preferably enlisting the help of an old occultist friend in New Orleans, but Aletheia is afraid to leave and time is running out. Whether you’re new to The Collywobbles Chronicles or a returning fan, this darkly humorous tale will both haunt and entertain you in equal measure.

If all goes well, I hope to have it out on Createspace by this time next month.

The Sun Sign and Character Development

In astrology, the sun sign represents our wants. It's our character, what we strive to be. Through our sun sign, we seek to distinguish ourselves in some way and carve out a unique identity. If the moon represents our relationship to the maternal figure, then the sun represents how we separate from that figure and leave our mark upon the world. The obvious literary implication, of course, is that the sun sign you choose for your protagonist will be a driving force in his or her efforts to enact change.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that it's only the sun sign that matters. Of course, it helps to know that an Aries will be impulsive and headstrong or a Pisces sensitive and impressionable, but it's really the house that's going to tell you how those identity needs manifest. In addition to the signs, an astrological chart is divided up into twelve houses with various attributes. The rising sign, determined by your time of birth, sets the stage for the whole chart, dictating which planets fall in which houses. For example, in The Girl With the Collywobbles, Aletheia has a first house sun*. This makes her individualistic, as well as giving her a magnetic quality that attracts the attention of others, but can also bring with it a feeling of self-consciousness, as if always being watched. (Something we'll see even more of in the forthcoming sequel, The Child of Aokigahara.) For her, nothing short of absolute individuality will give her a sense of identity.

There are a number of ways in which the sun's driving need for a self can manifest based on what house it's in. For example, a sixth house sun will produce someone whose sense of identity comes through their day-to-day work life. A ninth house sun will give the person an orientation towards philosophy, alternative religions and travel whereas an eleventh house sun produces someone who gets their sense of identity through groups, teams and ideologies.

If you want to get really creative with this, you can make the driving need something that's unrealized as a source of inner conflict. A restraining element elsewhere in the chart could make that natural area of expression harder to realize and therefore could be a hang-up for them. Imagine, for example, someone who has their sun in the tenth house, ruling careers, but who has a lot of planets in more fluidic, adaptable signs. You'll have someone whose sense of identity comes through a career but is held back by their tendency to be changeable and unfocused. The need to have an identity through their career will be at odds with their tendency to get distracted or explore options. The complexity of the chart provides a lot of options for brainstorming your characters' motivations.

Next up: the influence of the moon



*However, this doesn't mean she is an Aries rising. The planets fall in houses depending on the specific degree of a given planet, house, etcetera. In Aletheia's case, she's a Pisces rising with a first house Aries sun.

Character Development and Astrology

I'm fascinated by personality constructs, all personality constructs. I'm particularly interested in the enneagram and Myers-Briggs, and my diaries are full of lengthy analyses of my characters' types. However, I don't like using them to determine my characters' personalities beforehand. Rather, I write the character and after the fact, I mull over what type they might be.

Astrology is another matter entirely.

I find it very useful to come up with a character's chart in advance of writing them. When I wrote Collywobbles, I had a sun sign in mind for Aletheia's character, but didn't immediately create an astrological chart. However, in subsequent books, I've found myself increasingly creating charts in advance of writing a character. I use Astrolabe's free chart generator. Sometimes, I'll have a specific sign in mind for a character, but other times, I'll use a random generator app to determine their sign, as well as where and when they were born. Once I generate the chart, I'll study up on the character implications. Sue Tompkins' book, The Contemporary Astrologer's Handbook, is an invaluable resource for me, and I rely heavily on Howard Sasportas' The Twelve Houses as well.

Astrology gets a bad rap, largely due to people voicing opinions about it who have never delved any deeper than their daily horoscope. I find it to be especially ill-informed when proponents of the Myers-Briggs bash on astrology, since Jung embraced astrology and vice-versa. The truth is, psychoanalysis is a big part of chart interpretation. Authors like Tompkins speak to the underlying motives indicated by a chart, and certain positions, like the moon sign and the fourth house, delve deeply into the early childhood experience. The usefulness in thinking about these things in character development should be obvious. If you know that an Aquarius Moon predicts a detached mother, and your character has a particularly emotional placement (e.g. a Scorpio sun), then already you're getting into some of the underlying conflicts in the character's psyche. Other placements, such as which sun the house falls in or what sort of aspects to Neptune a character has, are equally informative.

I don't adhere religiously to charts. Usually, I'll go through a chart and look for any placements that are particularly interesting and use that as a starting point. I also find it helpful to cross-reference with other characters. I've occasionally had character dynamics leap out at me by glancing at a newly created chart.

In subsequent posts, I'll be going through the planets, explaining what they say about the personality as it can be applied to character creation. I'll get into the houses somewhat too. I'll start with the big ones (the sun, the moon and ascendant) and take it from there. Stay tuned!