Writing for One Reader: Uranus in Gemini and the Death of the Gatekeepers
“It has never been a better time to be a writer.”
People have been calling this a golden age for writers for years. Popular writers have social media accounts that reach millions, and you no longer need to approach a major publishing house, hat in hand, and ask them to publish your book.
There’s an extent to which all this gushing about golden ages is true. The internet does give writers a global audience, and there are options for self-publishing that don’t require you to give the printer a lot of money upfront, but the new deal in publishing isn’t working for a lot of writers.
In the post-scarcity world of publishing, there are fewer barriers to publishing, but the virtual shelves are infinitely more crowded. An author who, once upon a time, would have been known in their small town for stories told in front of the fire has their book on the same shelves as internationally bestselling authors, and the community no longer has its fireside chats. Lost in the shadow of giants, the small voices on tiny stages are lost. Or are they?
Shortly after I wrote about how it feels to be a Taurus in the age of Pluto in Aquarius, R.G. Miga posted a beautiful essay on physical books called Paper Temples: Doesn’t everyone want a haunted library?
In his essay, Miga argues that writing isn’t a commercially viable vocation for the vast majority of people with a deep soul need to write. If there isn’t enough room for most people to succeed according to the publishing industry’s traditional definition of success, he asks, how can writers find meaning in their work? Miga suggests that we create books that are magical objects of power rather than mass-produced commodities designed for information transfer. He speculates that books written this way “would have their own weird gravity. If we do our jobs well, people decades from now might feel the intangible pull of a book before they even open it.”
It reminds me of a story I heard years ago about one of those books with gravity. Ironically, I can’t remember the name of the book, but it’s the book’s story that matters. The book was written in the 18th century; long ago, but not so long ago that printing presses weren’t commonplace. The book wasn’t typeset, though. It was handwritten. The author of the book had no intention of publishing his words for a mass audience. He bought a blank book, wrote out a manuscript by hand for a friend, and presented the only copy to her.
Years after the death of the book’s recipient, papers from the family’s estate were being burned, and the book was thrown into the fire. By chance, a passerby saw the book in the fire. He reached into the flames, and pulled it out.
What the passerby found in the book was personal, yes, a book with an intended audience of one, but its voice spoke through the years to someone the author never intended to reach. The manuscript was passed from hand to hand until it found a printer, and the book (with the name I can’t remember) spent most of the 20th century in print.
If I were an inspirational writer, this is where I would talk about writing as an act of faith. We write with the hope that our words will reach the people who need them, but we will never really know the impact that our work has had on the world. This narrative, though, assumes the nameless book’s unexpected fame is the happy ending to the story. I like to imagine a different interpretation. What if the happy ending came much earlier? What if the author of the book delivered that manuscript to his friend and left happy, content that his book had found its intended audience of one?
For most of human history, stories weren’t meant for everyone. A big audience was miniscule by our standards, the number of people who could be reached by the human voice. Stories passed from person to person, changing with each telling in personal ways. Even after the development of book culture, storytelling was performance for a long time. Until the 1500s or later, books were read aloud to family and friends, not alone in silence. Storytellers knew their audience, they paused, glanced up from the page and thought, “If I shift this sentence or the tone of my voice just a little bit, my friend will laugh.” Storytelling wasn’t a race to reach the most people. A story was a gift that you gave to the people you love.
I had these kinds of experiences in mind when I published my first book in 2023. I was under no delusions that my book would be a commercial success, and I was right. In its first year, The Gods of Time Are Dead sold 32 copies. My publishing budget was miniscule, and the book still hasn’t earned out.
According to the dominant narrative, I should be embarrassed, but I’m not. That book went out into the world with a blurb from one of my heroes, Steven Forrest. People have sent me beautiful letters about how my book changed their life. A poet friend told me that my work expanded their understanding of what is possible to do with poetry. And my favorite witchy shop has my book on their shelves. I am proud of my little book. It has had more success, by my reckoning, than I could have ever imagined, and the fact that I can say that truthfully feels like the biggest victory.
I have an MFA in creative writing. When I started my MFA, I thought I was there to learn to write well. That wasn’t the purpose of the program at all. In an MFA program, you’re taught to write in a way that appeals to a particular kind of audience. The school I attended was known for memoir and a personal, informal style of poetry. It was politically progressive, and we were discouraged from studying older writers and traditional forms.
(My critical thesis was on Rilke, and the decision to write about a poet that old was the height of subversiveness, only made acceptable because my work wasn’t about his work but about translating German poetry.)
The poetry and prose I was trained to write assumed a particular kind of life. It assumed that the reward for all my hard work would be seeing my books reviewed in newspapers. Success was competing for PEN awards and serving on the faculty of a prestigious creative writing program.
I left the MFA program with a piece of paper, a novel that was too literary for mainstream sci-fi and too speculative to be literary, and two publication credits. I had no interest in doing the things I was trained to do, and I was unable to communicate with the people “back home.” I am not (and I never was) interested in an MFA’s definition of success, but I found that definition of success very difficult to shake.
For a long time, I felt like an exile, wondering if I was making a mistake by not making a home for myself in the world I was trained for. Then I had a dream: I was sitting across a table from myself. The self across me was angry because I had gotten an MFA. Applying for an MFA program, my angry-self said, meant that I was setting up the faculty of the program as the arbiters of the good, and “who are they to decide?”
Publishing The Gods of Time Are Dead was an act of defiance. The publishers and agents I was supposed to court as an MFA weren’t even given the chance to judge my book. It went to the printing press without them. My book is a gift to the people who love me.
Recently, the college that gave me my MFA shut down. It was one of many small liberal arts colleges to close, a sign of a larger institutional shift in academia. I suspect now, if I had pursued the life I was trained for, I would be like a highly specialized animal whose niche inhabit is falling apart. Watching the academics I know struggle to come to terms with this new world, I wonder if I would be able to adapt, if I were in their place.
I have been arguing for years that Pluto in Aquarius will force us to face the ways in which our world has gotten too big. We live in the shadow of dinosaurs, tiny mammals navigating systems that have become too big to fail and too inhumane to succeed. If we operate under the old rules, like my alma mater, we are one dinosaur’s bad opinion away from getting squished, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
I am writing this just after Uranus moved into Gemini. Gemini is stereotyped as the chatterbox that doesn’t listen. That is one of the potential faces of Gemini, but it isn’t the only face, and it definitely isn’t the best expression of that sign.
And Uranus isn’t falling for it. When Uranus gave us a preview of its Gemini era in 2025, I was astounded that, instead of hearing rebellious words, Uranus in Gemini met me with silence.
In retrospect, it seems so obvious: Gemini is the sign of the twins who take turns speaking and listening, passing the silence between them. Silence is the space that we make for relationships to dance in. Truly, deeply listening is one of the things we do for people we love.
Writers are trained to dismiss the opinion of the people who love us. “Oh, she’s just my mom. Of course, she loved my book.” But I wonder how much of that dismissal is the awkwardness of being known.
The rebellious voice of Uranus in Gemini says: the dinosaurs have all the power only if we allow them to. The giants can choose what we see on our screens, but they do not dictate our relationships. We own the airspace that carries our voices. We choose what is sacred. We choose who we love. But only if we don’t forfeit our power to choose the arbiters of the good for ourselves.
R.G. Miga invited us to focus our attention on creating books of power instead of fighting for scraps of commercial success. I believe this is only possible if we are willing to stop treating the love of our friends and family as a consolation prize.
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