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Request for Submissions: Small World Stories

Request for Submissions: Small World Stories
World Glass. Photo by Eric Francis.
Dear Friend and Reader:

As part of the 2008 annual edition of Planet Waves, we will be featuring the small world stories of our readers. These are stories where you marvel at what a small world it really is. For example, you go on your first trip to Paris at age 44 and run into your ninth-grade French teacher whom you have not seen since 1978. Or you take a job as director of marketing for a company and discover that your colleague is someone you started a business with in high school. Or you have a twin sister you were separated from at a young age, move to a new city and discover that she lives across the street.

We all have small world stories, and the feature section of this year's Planet Waves annual horoscope edition will be devoted to them. These will be reader contributed vignettes, and you are invited to contribute yours. They should be short -- about 200 to 800 words. You may submit more than one. Please invite your friends to do the same.

The writing period is during Mercury retrograde (excellent for looking back at the past), so the stories are due shortly after that ends: Monday, Nov. 5.

Please type neatly, and check your dates and facts several times. Try to write at least three drafts. The first draft can be a few paragraphs, then develop it over a few writing sessions. The key is to be concise and direct, giving only the necessary background information.

All stories must be true, original experiences that happened to you personally. If a story happened to someone else and you have a burning desire to write it, please send a short synopsis and indicate whether the subject is available for quotes. We will consider exemptions if you have a direct interview with the person to whom the event occurred, or were an eyewitness -- but would prefer to publish things that happened directly to you.

Please send your story to smallworld@planetwaves.net. All stories become the property of Planet Waves, Inc., and may be reproduced in any medium.

Thank you in advance for your submission. If you have any questions, please write to the email address indicated above and we will get back to you shortly.

Very truly yours,
Eric Francis


Libra Birthdays Part Two: Focus on Career

Libra Birthdays Part Two: Focus on Career
Michael Fink's chess set. Photo by Eric Francis.
Dear Friend and Libra:

This birthday report focuses on professional developments in the lives of all Librans. There is also additional information for those with birthdays on or after the Oct. 11 Libra New Moon.

Profession is closely related to following one's life calling. That, as we all know, can be mysterious, slippery or confusing territory. Part of the issue is that we tend to have our real desires for what to do bred out of us at an early age, or come under the influences of people who tell us what we should be doing. Many of the most appealing things for young adults are the most threatening for the older people around them, and typically we are told that we can't make a living doing the things we really want to do.

Your career tends to go in long, sweeping cycles, or these strange fits and starts wherein you make great strides in a relatively short time. There also seem to be significant phases where you completely redefine what you are doing, and then move on to other subjects as the years progress, and then return to previous ones. I suggest you look at these cycles, studying your resume or CV from that viewpoint.

I also suggest you make a "parallel CV" and track the activities that are not discussed as part of your employment marketing, but rather what you do behind the scenes, whether it be volunteer work, your alternative career or your so-called hobbies. For our purposes, you need all the information you can work with.

Three phases come to mind, and tracking them against your work history should prove to be interesting.

Between 2003 and 2005, you seemed to push your way into the world, or made some unusual progress making a name for yourself. You also may have felt under considerable pressure, like you had to make the most of circumstances, or like you were granted some authority you did not want. What you learned during this time frame will come into play now, because this is the time to sort out what you learned then and put it to use.

Between mid-2000 and late 2001, there may have been sudden developments, disruptions or unplanned for changes in course. You may have made unexpected gains or experienced unusual losses; there were a series of what can be called breaks in continuity.

There was a particularly unusual period between mid-1988 and mid-1991 that may have been characterized by intense focus on something humanitarian, environmental or when you took on a role that you felt exceeded your abilities significantly, but surprised yourself by being able to do exactly what you needed to do.

These are just three phases that I suggest you study carefully for clues as to your process of moving forward toward your most dearly held ambitions. With Mars now embarking on a long retrograde that occurs mostly in your house of professional ambitions and your mission in life, you need to know the past if you want to find the present. It is unfortunate that most people judge themselves fairly harshly for all that they have not achieved, but have little sense of what they have actually accomplished.

You need a balanced, accurate and most of all honest assessment. Go beyond the stories you tell yourself about what you want to do, and your interpretations of why you make your choices, and reach for a different perspective. Ask people close to you, including friends and family of both genders, how they perceive your professional course of events, and how they feel this matches or digresses from your true nature.

Let's talk about a few characteristics that your professional life would have, were you to be truly successful and feel like you had work with which you could not only happily live but also thrive.

1. You are likely to be extremely restless in an office environment. You were never really made for one, but over the past few years, following a schedule and doing anything menial have become insufferable. Routines of any kind are getting more and more difficult, and you need an environment that is free from annoying authority. You are probably becoming a rebel at work, as well as an inventor: you can solve any problem, if only people would listen.

2. Your best work is done at home. This, as well, has always been true, but given your growing distaste for an office environment, and your need for freedom (down to what you wear, when you take breaks and how you do your work), a home work environment would be greatly beneficial.

3. You work in distinct cycles. You would ideally have multiple careers each of which you would do for several months out of the year.

4. You need to be handling real information, relevant facts and information that actually interests you. At the moment you are probably best not working with numbers, but with ideas.

5. Ideally, your work would be directed to the future and not the past. You are currently at your most inventive and you have real ideas that will provide assistance and be of excellent use to many people. You just need to have your hands and your mind in them.

6. Some international angle would be helpful, even if you're the person who handles overseas clients. Canada will suffice, but the further the better. If you can get involved in producing literature, proposals, reports or business plans, you will excel in any aspect of work dealing with international culture. This is not just because you're a natural-born diplomat; it's because you are obsessed with finding out what is going on in different parts of the world.

Leaving behind career for a moment, I'll close with a few comments about your personal life. It would seem that the only way to find out what you want is to find out what you don't want; or at least this will prove to be a dependable source of information and logic. And that information is coming in strong right now.

You tend to be someone who values extreme depth in your emotional encounters, yet who may find it difficult to express your most deeply held feelings. Here again, you are in a period of inner review wherein you will first find the feelings, and then find the words to describe them.

I suggest that you devote yourself this year to doing precisely that. You may feel so strongly about certain people, things, ideas, and emotions that you simply expect others to empathically pick up on exactly what is going on in your heart and soul. But if you want to have some clue how challenging it is for others to fathom you, consider the extent you must go to know your own sense of inner reality. Then assume it's two or three times more difficult for someone else to have a grasp.

You are the one who needs to bridge the gap: in words or tangible pictures, not assumptions, innuendos or vague suggestions. You need to have the shorter conversation with yourself, and the longer conversation with someone else. Remember what you talked about. Ask your friends and lovers to remind you. Make sure you remind yourself, and take heed that while many things begin with words, they only take us so far. Our words may be a map of our failures, or a map to the future, but they are a map -- not the territory.

Yours & truly,
Eric Francis


CREDITS: Associate Editor: Priya Kale. Webmaster: Anatoly Ryzhenko. Proofreader and Fact Checker: Sara Churchville. Horoscope Editor: Jessica Keet. Associate Photo Editor: Sharon Bellenger. Business Manager: Chelsea Bottinelli.

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