By Eric Francis

......The Planet Waves horoscope has been written continaully since May 1995.

......This project first originated in print as a twice-monthly horoscope called The Navigator in in Free Time magazine in Poughkeepsie, NY. At the time, I was at the end of my tether as an investigative reporter and looking for something interesting to do, and the Patric Walker Daily Horoscope, which I had followed in the New York Post with no prior interest in astrology, got my attention. One night, I sat down and wrote two columns, and faxed them over to Free Time. They traded me ad space for the column. It was that simple. I then began publising the monthly horoscope in The Underground Astrologer, a photocopied sheet with the horoscope and a short essay, which I distributed for about 10 months with quite a bit of popular and commercial success in upstate NY. Around this time, Chronogram, a regional arts, culture and spirituality magazine based in New Paltz, NY picked up the monthly, and is still publishing it today. My next two venues were on the radio, as resident astrologer for Oldies '97 in Poughkeepsie in 1996, then as host of Radio Navitagor on Radio Woodstock in 1996, 1997 and 1998.

......The column's first Internet venue, before I understood what the net was, was something called Virtual Woodstock at Ching.com, after which it moved to a site called SceneUnseen.com, then (along with some articles which are still posted) to AccessNewAge.com. It appears or has appeared at Astrology.net, Horoscopes4You.com, Mystic Gardens at AOL-UK (where it still runs each month) and in a variety of other online publications. The column has been penned everywhere from a Roman Catholic cathedral in Sicily to the outskirts of London to cafés in every corner of America, Germany, British Columbia and Alpha Centauri.

......In 1998, Rob Brezsny hooked me up with the Colorado Daily, which was the origin of the first weekly horoscope (in their weekend edition), which ran from August 1998 through February 2000. It also appeared in a New Mexican weekly called Crosswinds. Through 1998 and 1999 Rob also published about a dozen of my essays on RealAstrology.com (beginning with Astrology as the Art of Bullshit) on everything from masturbation to Bill Clinton's horosocpe (a narrow range of issues), and a few lengthy articles on my trekking around Germany. These are indexed in various places, and seem to be fairly easy to find at the Televisionary Oracle archive at Free Will Astrology.

......On Dec. 21, 1998, I posted to the Planet Waves homepage for the first time. This internet site replaced my first homepage, The Worlds of Eric Francis (created by Al Sirois at Jazz Police Multimedia) and the temporary Star-Navigator site. Last July, I introduced the EricFrancis.com homepage, mainly as a way to organize new postings, but it's still called Planet Waves. In three-and-a-half years online, Planet Waves has been visited at least 2.5 million times and has had about 7 million hits. Current traffic is about 19,000 visits per week, most of them unique visitors. It has been reached by hundreds of thousands of readers from all parts of the world. We remain a commercial free site, except for self-promotion and links making my astrological consultations available to readers.

......My astrology writing appears or has appeared in The London Daily Mirror, The Mountain Astrologer, Meridian, Mercury, StarIQ.com, and an assortment of other places.

......My investigative journalism, reporting and other work have appeared in The Village Voice, Sierra, In These Times, Lies of Our Times, The New York Times, Woodstock Times and a number of other times, as well as in various broadcast media, from WBAI/Pacifica Radio to WABC radio in New York. In days of yore, I have been called the senior editor of Kane's Beverage Week, editor of Health Professions Report and the New York Education Law Report, and have been involved in innumerable student publishing ventures, most notably Generation magazine and the reach student handbook at SUNY-Buffalo, and Student Leader News Service.