Susan Miller On Key Astrological Events In 2023, Part 1 - Exclusive Interview

If you follow astrology, then you likely know the name Susan Miller well — she is a highly respected and influential astrologer who provides trusted monthly forecasts, for a start. She's also the founder of AstrologyZone.com and has written 14 best-selling books on astrology, including "Grand Mutation – 200 Years Ahead."

Miller also creates yearly calendars. Her "Year Ahead 2023" astrological wall calendars include her insights on how the planetary cycles will affect the year to come in relation to your sun sign and your rising sign. The calendars include her analysis of all 12 signs as well as eclipses, retrogrades, and other significant moments in the year to come that may impact your endeavors.

Recently, Glam had a chance to chat with Miller about her calendar and other projects. Miller opened up about her astrological predictions as well as shared some of the challenges she's faced in her life and career. She told the story of how she knew from a young age that she was meant to be a writer and harness new technology to spread her messages.

My first question [is] about the event, "The Year 2023 and Beyond," on Sunday [April 23]. I've seen it described as "magical," your interactive presentation.

Susan Miller: Oh, [my PR representative] used that word to describe it?

Yes.

Miller: We're right around the eclipses. I'm sure people are going to have questions, and I do a lot of question and answer [time]. Every year has special features that no other year seems to have, so I want to talk about those. Pluto moving into Aquarius is a huge deal because Pluto has not been in Aquarius for 248 years.

That's so long.

Miller: Yes, and the last time Pluto was in Aquarius, we had the American Revolution and the French Revolution ... and we feel like we're about on the cusp of another revolution.

Miller [continued]: I used to have a partner who did [the calendars] for me, and he was the director of Time Life books. His name was Arthur Haydenville. He was handling it every year, but then he retired, and the printer called up and said, "You can't make a calendar this year." I said, "Why not?" [They said,] "The man is gone."

"The man." Very ominous.

Miller: My publisher, "the man," is gone. I said, "You don't want to bid on it?" [They said,] "I don't want to bid for you, no." I said, "All right, then we won't invite you." My team started getting names of printers, and we would have calls.

We chose ANRO outside of Philadelphia, and they had the equipment. My calendar is wide, and most places can't handle it that wide, so that narrowed it down pretty fast. I also wanted an archival paper and no bleed-through. And it's heavy ...

Nobody knows this, but I do charts for every month — a new moon and a full moon for every sun. It's 24 lunations ... But some months, if the full moon falls on the 28, 29, 30, or 31, we have to make that one too because you're going to feel it. Those are hard months because I have to talk about three lunations.

Then, we start printing out the aspects. We do it on Microsoft Word. We number 1 to 31 or 1 to 30, or 1 to 28 or 29. Your computer will print out Saturn square, the sun, Jupiter ... The software I have is no longer made, so I have to keep one computer 16-bit and not use new ones — not 32-bit, not 64-bit. Apple keeps saying, "Upgrade. Upgrade." Not this little guy — I can't do that.

[My former assistant] Courtney now does it with her boyfriend, even though she doesn't work for me anymore. She uses a ruler, and she types. He reads what it is, and then they switch. He's not an astrologer, but she is ... She studied for a long time. They double-check [and] double-check, and they give me 13 documents.

Now, I have the digital files on Microsoft Word of what every aspect means. It also says in parentheses "Taurus," "Virgo" ... It tells me the degrees, but I often will just pull up a chart real quickly. You have to say something accurate, but you also have to do it in an entertaining way. You have to use ... I constantly push myself to use new words. I heard somebody on TV lately. He said, "We have to do this with alacrity." I'm like, "I have not used that word at all."

Susan Miller [continued]: Now I'm starting to write all of the [horoscopes]. That takes two weeks. I keep telling myself it should take shorter, but it [doesn't]. I keep sending them to [my chief editor] Edward, and he doesn't give it to the five senior editors under him. He gives the app to them.

I try to be so complete because I worry about, "What if [my readers] are looking for housing?" I try to think, "What could they possibly be looking for?" So now [Edward] is doing that. By now, no one can give me a word count for the calendar because words are different lengths, but we find that 57 words is the limit. He says, "Wait, Susan, we have to put full moon. We have to put Chinese lantern festival."

[Miller's PR representative] Dawna Shuman: She was up on a billboard ... in Beijing, like a thousand feet high and wide, when she got to do her event, Refresh. We sent her to do events, and she was huge in China.

Miller: My agent over there said, "Susan — sending [a] film crew to Manhattan. Must bring five changes of clothes." ... [I asked] "Why?" [They said,] "You must say greetings to Chinese readers. Many reading you."

I said, "Okay." I'm doing all this, and it's all rush, rush. You got to do tomorrow. You barely get time to go get a blowout. I said, "Where is this going to be?" "On a Jumbotron in the middle of the city." I'm like, "Oh my God." I'm glad I didn't know that before I did it.

Miller [continued]: [I remember] I was 9 years old. I was at my grandma's house. I said, "Mama, would you read my chart? What will I do when I grow up?" It was 4:00 in the afternoon. My mother was done with all her chores. She said, "Okay, you want me to read your chart? Let me go get it."

We're sitting under the lilacs, and it was so fragrant, and we're up in the country in the Catskills. My mother says, "Hmm, you're going to write." I said, "Write? Nobody in our family writes for a living." "You're going to write, and I'm going to work on your grammar now that I see this."

She's Gemini, so of course, she'd say that. She said, "But when you get close to 40, end of your thirties, late thirties, some newly invented form of communication — so new we don't know the name of it yet — will change the way you work and be the channel in which you make your ultimate contribution to the world."

Miller [continued]: I'm like, "How can you look at a piece of paper and tell me that?" She said, "Well, Susan, you're going toward Aquarius. Aquarius is everything new. It's ruled by Uranus, which is electricity, so it has something to do with plugging in the wall ... TV plugs into the wall, and I think you will be on TV, but that's my generation, not yours. You will be on TV, but that will be the hub of the wheel. You must always go to the latest, greatest inventions, the newest ... even if you're terrified of it, because that's where your destiny lies."

I was in shock ... Now I'm following her around the house — you know how kids are. "You have to tell me more. You have to tell me more." Well, she said it's something very new because Aquarius is what comes next. It's all new inventions. "It's not invented yet because you don't get to your mid-heaven until your late thirties or 40. You start with writing first."

I was writing for magazines, and I was an agent for commercial photographers, but I've always had health problems because of my birth defect — I bleed internally. I've had 40 blood transfusions in my life. My health has always decided what kind of work I could do. With writing, at least I could sit down, because I was breaking my leg. There were always problems — I had no marrow; that's why I was breaking my thigh bone.

But anyway, [my mother] said, "Yep, that's it." I said, "Wait, you have to tell me more." She did, and I never asked her again. I was speechless. She said, "There are little dots or lines that go through the air that are invisible. You can't see them, and it has a direct link to your writing. I don't know what it is because Aquarius is an air sign, so it goes through the air." She said, "I don't know what it is" — she was predicting the internet.

I first worked for magazines. Life was my first, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan — before I did Cosmo, Young Rubicon. I did research, but I didn't care for research. It was a little weird, like, find out how many people had a currently valid passport, went to one foreign country this year and drank Johnny Walker scotch, and had Ferragamo shoes. It was so small. I also felt that the universe was too small to trust, and they would take off the double asterisks.

Miller [continued]: I loved photography, and at Seventeen, they gave me all the little junk in the back of the book. I would work with the photographer down the hall, and I said, "I want to be in charge of all the little people." I became the top dog salesman. Then I got married — I went on my honeymoon, and they took everything away from me. They said, "These are married men with children. They need your accounts." There was nothing you could do about it.

Then I broke my leg, and again, couldn't go in. I'd bleed to death. All my recoveries with this left leg were eight months, nine months ... I would be in the hospital seven or eight months, and then in therapy for so long. One day I said to my mother, "Go out and buy every magazine you can find that has a horoscope in it — maybe a dozen." McCalls did; that was surprising to me. So I wrote, I called ... I'm looking at the masthead, and I said, "Well, Amy Bigham ..."

[The editor] sent me clips, and I was writing for this magazine named Beauty that no one ever heard of, but I was getting a lot of attention. Even Cosmo called me, but I didn't want to work for Cosmopolitan — they have all that sexy stuff; [I'm] not into that. I got the job, and I wrote five cover stories.

Miller [continued]: It takes a good six months to write [the calendar], and then we have to fact-check it. After, usually, the art director will point out about ten days that I've written too much because we have a full moon, and that needs space and the picture of a little moon ... or it might be a holiday that day. It's hard to judge and do the calendar. Not every board director can do it. It's hard.

This year was the first year we brought the color all the way down. Usually, we ghosted it, but I like the color. I said, "Do we all agree that we should do it?" Everybody said, "Yes."

It's a beautiful design.

Miller: It was funny. When I took over the calendar ... I'm sitting at my desk, and I could not figure out Valker's way of getting a barcode. I said, "Oh my God." [My editor] said, "What's wrong?" "I can't figure this out; Valker is so hard to communicate with." He said, "I'll do it." Well, he qualified for Jeopardy eight times, so I figured if anybody could do it ... and he did. Then we are dying to get them to the public. They have to dry on metal racks for about a week to 10 days.

Then they get trucked to the bindery, and it's in [the] Philadelphia area — it's in the outskirts, but the printer won't tell us where the bindery is. The bindery then ships them to our fulfillment house. I have found that of all the steps, your weakest step is the fulfillment house.

Really? Why is that?

Miller: We've got a good one now, but some of them aren't organized. They'll call me up and say, "We have a delivery man in Moscow walking around lost. Can you tell us the address again?" I'm like, "The reader wrote to you." But one of the reasons I'm tearing apart my website is I want to put it on Shopify ... We try so hard. We even have calendars at AstrologyZone.com. We have support at Astrology Zone.

I have people coming to me saying, "We could do charts online, and we can have AI write the interpretations" — I've turned them down. I am terrified of what they're going to say to my readers, and I can't possibly monitor all of that. I said, "I'm halfway through writing all the interpretations, and I have an engineer in Prague. I am going to be able to put charts online for free with my interpretations, and you'll be able to print out a report for free."

I want to give my readers a present — they've been through a lot. This person got very angry at me and said, "You're not going with new technology, and you love new technology." I said, "I do, but it's too early."

Visit AstrologyZone.com for more insights from Susan Miller and to check out the Your Year Ahead 2023 Astrological Wall Calendar.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and will continue in Part 2.