When the work gets murky, the inner editor gets loud
A New Moon says begin. A sky full of retrogrades says get your bearings first.
There is a sentence in your draft you’ve rewritten four times in the last 48 hours. Each version is tidier than the one before it, and each one has a little less life in it. You haven’t written anything new in an hour. You’ve been sanding the same three lines because they won’t come clear, and sanding feels like progress when the work refuses to open. This is a reflex. When you can’t see the work, you reach for the red pen. You tighten a sentence that isn’t finished being born. You cut a line before it’s told you what it came to say. The red pen feels like control, and control feels like the opposite of this fog.
Today we have a New Moon in Cancer. The online world will tell you a New Moon is a beginning: plant the seed, set the intention, start the thing. In the general sense, that’s true. But I never read a transit in isolation, and this one is closer to a whisper than a starting gun. Cancer is the sign of the interior, of home and the body’s memory, so even this small voice that says begin is pointing you inward, not out toward the world. And it’s being drowned out by louder company.
Mercury is retrograde in Cancer, walking the mind backward. And it’s currently positioned right next to the New Moon. Neptune has turned retrograde. Pluto has been retrograde for two months. Saturn, the planet of discipline and forward motion, is slowing to a full stop and about to turn back too. Nearly every slow-moving planet is backing up or standing still at once. A New Moon is one night, and its charge lasts a couple of days. These retrogrades are the weather of the current season, and that’s why they carry the room. They are all saying what the fog is saying. Go inward. Get your bearings before you begin.
This is the tug of war you’ve been feeling. Part of you wants to push. Finish the draft. Send the pitch. Force the murky thing into a shape you can show somebody. That pull is real, and it’s the New Moon in you wanting to start. But the fog is present for a reason, and the reason has nothing to do with you failing at your craft. The season is pulling everything inward on purpose. Stop. Get your bearings before you build another thing on ground you haven’t finished assessing.
Watch what the inner editor does when the work goes murky. The inner editor can’t stand not knowing. Its whole job is to make things correct, legible, finished, and safe to be seen.
The sky has a name for that reflex right now. For about the last year and a half, the South Node, the comfort zone the collective keeps circling back to, has been sitting in Virgo. Virgo is the editor of the zodiac: the sign that corrects, refines, tidies, and perfects. A comfort zone is the place you know how to be. It’s also the place you fall back into under pressure, without choosing it or even noticing you’ve gone there. So when the work goes murky, you reach for the oldest tool in the house. You correct. Near the end of the month, that comfort zone moves out of Virgo, and the South Node has been asking you to set the red pen down before it does.
So in the fog, the inner editor panics and starts cutting. It tells you the writing is bad when the writing is simply early. It confuses unformed with wrong. Every time you let it tighten a line that hadn’t finished arriving, you edit away the very thing that was trying to come through. You can’t correct a thing into existence. The murk has to be allowed to stay murky long enough to become what it is.
And for us, the inner editor is often not even our own. If you’re a Black writer, the voice that gets loud in the fog learned its job a long time ago. It’s the white gaze that needs every reference explained. It’s the writing workshop that called your rhythm a mistake. It’s the part of you that was conditioned to translate your own sentences into something more acceptable before anyone else could reject them first. That inner editor was a survival skill once. It kept you safe in rooms that weren’t designed to hold you or your voice. It can’t be the one holding the pen while you’re trying to find out what you sound like with no one translating or policing you. Not here in the fog, where the truest material lives.
So here is the practice for these next ten days, until Mercury turns back around. Leave the draft alone. Sit somewhere quiet and give yourself five or ten minutes with your eyes closed and nothing to do. Breathe, and let the fog be fog. I know that sitting still with yourself is the hardest thing I could ask you to do. It’s harder than any deadline, because the quiet is where the inner editor gets loud. So don’t brace against it. When it comes forward, let it. Greet it. Toi Derricotte has a poem called “For Black Women Who Are Afraid,” where she tells a frightened woman to write the poem about being afraid to write. To turn toward the fear and put it down on the page.
So do that. Open your journal and ask the fear a question. What do you need to feel safe? Write down whatever it says, in its own words, and don’t argue with it. You’re not handing it the pen. You’re asking the frightened thing what it’s been afraid of this whole time, because no one else ever has. This is what this particular Cancer New Moon is asking for: emotional safety underneath the writing. Tend that first, and the words will have somewhere safe to land.
The clarity is coming, and not simply because Mercury turns direct soon. It comes because safety is what the words have been waiting for all along. When you make it safe enough to return, they return. That part belongs to you. So for now, you owe no one a finished product. You owe yourself a little safety in the fog, and that safety is how you call the work back.
This is the work we do together every month inside the Temple: moving through the fog in community, with writers who know what it is to sit in it. When the inner editor gets loud and you can’t yet see the work, you bring it to The Gathering, knowing you’re not in it alone. $25/month or $250/year.
About the author
High Priestess Lakeisha is the founder of The Story Temple, a spiritual writing sanctuary for Black writers healing their relationship with their voice. She is a developmental editor with close to 10 years of experience across fiction and nonfiction, an initiated priestess, a certified evolutionary astrologer, and a shadow work facilitator. Her editorial roots are in fantasy and speculative fiction, the genre space where she first saw the patterns she would later have language for.
Lakeisha’s work holds craft and spirit as one practice. The Elemental Writing Energetics framework reads the manuscript. The Elemental Shadow Wounds framework reads the architect behind the words (the writer). The Story Temple exists on a single premise: writing is a spiritual practice, and a free sentence is a prayer being answered.
Morrison knocked the gaze off the shoulder. Baldwin showed what the eyes could do once it was gone.