The Challenges of Being a Word Nerd in Astrology

Impossible Dreams is almost out in paperback!

I got the e-book version of Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces published right as Saturn went into Pisces on March 7, 2023. I hoped to get the paperback version out with Saturn at 0° Pisces too. Thanks to Saturn’s current retrograde back to 0° Pisces, that’s finally going to happen!

As Saturn nears its November 4 station, the last few details are absolutely dragging on forever. I think I’m just going to enjoy Halloween — my sister’s kids are big enough to trick-or-treat for the first time! — and come back to the book after that.

Saturn at 0° Pisces with Jupiter in Taurus, as is the case now, is shaping up to be a very different experience from Saturn at 0° Pisces with Jupiter in Aries, which was the case in March. Perhaps the speed with which the book came about could only have happened with Jupiter in Aries — it went from the call for essays on January 3, 2023, to publication on March 7, 2023.

When I came back to it this month to finish dealing with the paperback formatting, however, I made more corrections than I expected to. Taurus is known for an interest in consistency, and one of the main issues I found was inconsistency in the capitalization of astrological terms.

I love being part of astrology’s current rapid growth spurt, but the challenge is that we don’t yet have the sort of stable guidelines that govern more institutionalized fields of inquiry. The Associated Press Stylebook has a religion section that goes into exhaustive detail on word usage and capitalization with regard to especially the three Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), but it is not helpful at all concerning the questions I need to answer at this point. When I began ghostwriting for astrological websites in 2020, I used the limited guidance available on the American Federation of Astrologers website in combination with The Associated Press Stylebook.

Still, I often need more. Googling whether particular terms should be capitalized is typically inconclusive. One groaner of an article on whether Zodiac signs should be capitalized went back and forth between “Zodiac” and “zodiac,” sometimes within the same paragraph!

For now, my rulings are “Zodiac,” “universe,” and “Saturn return,” based on the most common usages already within the book. If we don’t have an external style guide to adhere to, we can at least be internally consistent. In the future, however, I really would like to get astrology’s word nerds together to come up with a style guide, because not having one is maddening.

When I upload the paperback to Amazon, I will also upload updated content for the e-book, and people who already own the e-book will be able to get the updated content as well. Kindle users who have Automatic Book Update turned on should see the changes automatically. Amazon describes the processes for manual and automatic book updates here, and, if you want to turn on Automatic Book Update, the relevant drop-down is here.