Monthly reflections from the edge of the stacks · July 2026
Hey! This post is my monthly missive to let you know about my astrology and other esoteric posts on my blog, The Last Page Before Dawn, research rabbit holes, book stuff, and whatever I’m doing that’s free for you or a bonus you won’t find anywhere but The Spiritual Eclectic website.
Daily Best Life
- Between the Florida heat, thunderstorms, and writing all night, I’ve been a complete failure at switching to daytime writing, but I did try. Very early morning walks down to watch the white caps of Tampa Bay ahead of Tropical Storm Bertha, and then on Anderson Park with its lions and fountains in the early sunshine when the day is just pre-heating, and then a stop by Buddy Brew Coffee for breakfast with my laptop? All of it worked well for about two mornings before I was back to writing all night. It’s just my natural rhythm.
- Still, July has been a fabulous month for healing physical injuries! I actually had to write it all down. My physical wins for the month, that is. Otherwise, I’d be comparing my leg pain to where it was–and wasn’t–10 years ago or even 5 years ago. Writing everything down, though, meant I was able to see clearly that a total of 6 visits to my physical therapist have put me back to where I was 2 years ago, maybe as much as 3. Now that we’re fixing the Achilles’ tendonitis in my right foot, I’m no longer limping and my left knee no longers hurts. I wish, badly, that I’d started PT last fall. If I had, I could’ve driven to visit my brother one last time. I knew I was physically in too much pain to do many of the things I wanted to do, but I guess I didn’t realize how much pain and certainly didn’t realize that it could be undone. Most of my doctors just shrugged it off as “you’re over 40.”
What I’m Currently Working On
- Currently writing/editing: I’m currently working on several secret projects under a pen name. I have a dark romantasy off to the editor and I’m currently writing the second book in a paranormal romance series.
- Wrapping up: The print version of Vertex, Anti-Vertex, and the Fated Path in Astrology is almost ready for sale. I expect it to hit the street in August.
- Free stuff: The big news–and my subscribers are hearing it first–is that I’m making a bunch of my novels, especially the ones set in the Secret Lives of Librarians universe, available to read free online here. No catch, but if you want to download, you’ll need to buy them either directly from my onsite store or any of the major platforms. No firewalls for several months, and after that they’ll still be free to any of my subscribers. No subscription charges, just a passcode after several chapters to keep out scrapers, and I’ll put the passcode in the monthly newsletter, but that’ll be a few months away yet. Why the free online library? Several reasons. One has to do with my annoyance at a couple of platforms that nickel and dime both author and reader. Another has to do with the fact that it’s a hard year for a lot of my die-hard fans, and while I’m able to depend on other things I write to pay the bills, I want my dedicated audience to have access to some of my favorite stories, especially the ones from the heart. You can get started in my online library. I’ll try to add at least one story or novella every month, beginning in August 2026.
Newly available
- Music: My soundtracks continue to populate across music platforms like Apple and Spotify. Just look for Lorna Tedder and the Warrior Librarians. Newest are Rite of Awakening, Rite of Letting Go, and Altered Destiny. I’m still enjoying making little music videos when the creativity bug hits. One of music vids is getting attention over on Facebook and it’s one of my favorites. The lyrics were all written by me, and some of the music.
- Non-Fiction: Contracting for Rapid Acquisition, a Federal acquisition business guide that includes the best of my advice for the next generation of procurement experts, is out as an ebook and will, momentarily, be out in print and audio. If you’re not part of the Federal acquisition world, you may still find the concepts useful and some of the stories a little entertaining, like the look on my boss’ face when he realized my new office assistant was a Club Fed prisoner, but hey, when you’re desperately understaffed, you do what you have to.
✍️ Fresh on the Blog: What You Might Have Missed
Catch up on the latest reflections, experiments, and stories from the past month:
Leo Season: Let Yourself Be Seen (Jul 22)
Category: Astrology
Leo season isn’t about ego. It’s about the courage to be seen — to create without apology and let your light take up the space it needs.
Fairweather Friends and the People Who Need You Broken (Jul 20)
Categories: Aging Well | Relationships | Serene Living
We get warned about fairweather friends early. Nobody warns you about the foul-weather ones — the people who only stay close while you’re still in pieces.
Juno in Synastry: The People Who Feel Like “Real Partners” (Jul 19)
Categories: Astrology | Relationships
High Venus and low Juno gives you chemistry and nowhere to sit. When Juno clicks in synastry, you feel it in your bones — the recognition of a real co-author.
Saturn Conjunct the Anti-Vertex: Transit and Synastry (Jul 18)
Categories: Astrology | Synastry & Relationship Astrology | Transits & Timing
Saturn conjunct the Anti-Vertex is the sternest exam on the fated axis. Here’s what it asks of you in transit and in synastry — and how I finally passed mine.
Silo Season 3 and the Cost of Erasing a Memory (Jul 17)
Category: Books
Silo season 3 asks whether erasing 10,000 memories counts as mercy. I spent a whole novel on that same question, and I’m still not done with the question.
Beyond Fixed Fates: What Turn of Earth Taught Me About Choice, Legacy, and Love (Jul 16)
Categories: Aging Well | Books | Writing Life
Turn of Earth wrestles with fixed fates, legacy, and love across time. Here’s what writing it taught me about choice, aging, and the stories we leave behind.
Juno in the Houses: Where You Seek Loyalty, Recognition, and Mutual Commitment (Jul 15)
Categories: Astrology | Relationships
Juno’s house placement reveals the specific theater of your life where you need a sacred contract most—where you cannot, and will not, settle for a lopsided arrangement.
What the Anti-Vertex Really Means in Astrology (Jul 14)
Category: Astrology
The Vertex gets the attention, but the Anti-Vertex is the half of the fated axis you can actually work with.
Social Media Mosquitoes (Jul 12)
Categories: Books | Serene Living
Not all social media engagement is worth having. When someone follows your every post but only ever shows up to push their own agenda—especially during the hardest moments of your life—that’s not a follower. That’s a mosquito.
Juno Beyond Romance: Creative Partnerships, Friendships, and Chosen Alliances (Jul 11)
Categories: Astrology | Relationships
Limiting Juno to marriage is like using a high-powered iMac just to check the weather. She governs every sacred alliance—the friends, collaborators, and chosen family who co-author your life.
Travel for Solar Return: Month Three and the Expanding Circle (Jul 7)
Categories: Applied Astrology & Case Studies | Astrology | Travel
Part 9 of an ongoing relocation astrology experiment. After three months, the answer is no longer Tampa or Colorado. The structure still holds — but the circle around it is finally expanding outward.
Able-Bodied Is a Temporary State of Being (Jul 4)
Categories: Aging Well | Health
A friend once told me that able-bodied is a temporary state of being. I didn’t fully understand it then. I do now—and it changed how I see accessibility, empathy, and every assumption I’d quietly made about who gets to move through the world with ease.
The Difference Between Venus and Juno: Attraction vs. Partnership (Jun 27)
Categories: Astrology | Relationships
Venus is the spark, Juno is the hearth. Understanding the difference between these two energies is what separates a great first date from a great long-term contract.
Why AI Couldn’t Write This Astrology Book (Jun 24)
Categories: Astrology | Books
I’ve always tried to write books only I could write. Here’s why the Vertex — and fifteen years of lived experience with it — made this one undeniably mine.
🔭 What’s Fascinating Me Now
Curated stories from the research rabbit holes that opened up around things I’ve already written.
Because I wrote about hidden texts in The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks…
The Herculaneum Scrolls Are Finally Giving Up Their Secrets — Without Ever Being Opened. More than 1,800 papyrus scrolls were carbonized into lumps of coal when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, buried in a villa thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law — the only large-scale library from the classical world to survive in its entirety. For 270 years, every attempt to unroll one turned it to dust. Now “virtual unwrapping” — CT scans plus machine-learning algorithms trained to spot carbon ink on carbonized papyrus — has let a trio of students decode the first complete passages without touching the scrolls: a previously unknown work by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, on the nature of pleasure. Scholars call collections like this the “invisible library” — and this is the key that opens it. National Endowment for the Humanities
Because I wrote about crossing between worlds in Speak to the Dead…
Buried With Homer: The Mummy Sent to the Afterlife Holding the Iliad. When archaeologists opened a Roman-era tomb in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, they found a papyrus bundle that had been placed on the mummified individual’s abdomen during a mortuary ritual 1,600 years ago. Analysis revealed a fragment of Homer’s Iliad — specifically the Catalog of Ships. It’s the first known case of the Greek epic being used as part of the ancient mummification process: one reader who went to the afterlife dreaming of the exploits of Trojan War heroes. Archaeology Magazine — July/August 2026
Because ritual and the goddess run all through the Rites of Passage trilogy…
Why Modern Witches Are Making Pilgrimages to an Ancient Temple in Turkey. An hour north of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast sit the ruins of Lagina, home to the largest known temple dedicated to Hekate — goddess of witchcraft, the moon, crossroads, and communication with the dead. In antiquity, a key-bearing ritual carried a sacred key along a five-mile processional road, symbolizing passage between life and death, the conscious and the unconscious. Today Hekate’s devotees still come — some leaving offerings of garlic, pomegranates, and apples at the ruins — and the drive in even crosses a modern three-way junction, an echo of the goddess of the crossroads. CNN Travel — May 2026
Because I wrote about star maps in Altered Destiny…
The First Maya Astronomer-Mathematician We Know by Name. On the wall of a small building at Xultun, Guatemala, researchers have deciphered a 1,200-year-old “rough draft” of a formula charting the synodic cycles of Venus and Mars against human calendars — and at the bottom of the text, a signature: Sak Tahn Waax, “White-chested Fox.” It’s the first direct mention of an ancestral Maya astronomer-mathematician by personal name, and the oldest recorded name of an astronomer-mathematician anywhere in the Americas. Someone did that celestial math twelve centuries ago — and signed the work. New Scientist — July 14, 2026
Last updated: July 2026 · Sources: National Endowment for the Humanities, Archaeology Magazine, CNN Travel, New Scientist.
📚 From My Bookshelf
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Closing Reflection
This letter is written between midnight and dawn, like the rest of my work. That’s the page the title comes from — the last one before the light comes back.
Thank you for being here.
The Last Page Before Dawn is a monthly dispatch from thespiritualeclectic.com. Forward freely.