Introduce Yourself : Old & Continuing Project plus New Turns... by Isabeau Vollhardt

Writing isn't the only vocation I have. For the past 20 plus years, I've been in health care (Chinese Medicine practitioner) and since 2013 I've entered the Western health care stream as a patient -- the biggest part of the learning curve? I have to continually learn more about my condition (autoimmune disease) than my doctors know, AND I have to learn about the rabbit holes their 400 year old obsolete in the face of quantum physics causality model will make them go (they will go deep into any number of rabbit holes). So this brings me to something I've done for even longer: research. My BA was in Philosophy (why? because I had to write my ass off for that major AND I did not have to pander to my professors' biases -- all I had to do was make a best effort to support my conclusions based on the text at hand, and that's fair). Even before then, I began studying Astrology (at the age of 16, where I had to learn how to calculate charts with math -- no computer system available -- and had to buy a number of books with which to make those calculations). I provided astrological consultations for a while...and I also looked at using natal horoscopes to build the back story for key characters in what I was writing (and also to flesh out their personality so the protagonist would be a round character, and maybe the secondary characters would become flat characters pretending to be round, i.e., almost round -- it's really difficult to write works where more than one character is fully rounded, but not impossible). I have NOT used this strategy in writing #TheCasebookOfElishaGrey which I'm now working on vol. IX for the simple reason that I don't know exactly how far back in time Atlantis was....much less whether they would use Greek Astrology (which is what modern Western Astrology is based upon). However, I have reached out to another writer about using this tool to create characters that are deeper and richer than what most writing classes might teach...so anyone who has questions on how to do this, feel free to let me know! Oh, I guess I should say, I started these studies at 16, and now i'm 61. So I've been working with this paradigm for a while....