Your weekly dose of moonlight, mystery, and mildly organised chaos.

🌙 This Week on the Dark Moon Rocks Morning Show...

This week's radio show came to you from an entirely different studio...

Not the boat.

Not the familiar little corner where everything has its place and the kettle knows its job.

This week I have been broadcasting from my parents' little box bedroom, surrounded by my lovely parents, who are probably better at remembering passwords than I am these days (although do not tell them I admitted that), a cat convinced the house belonged entirely to him, another cat convinced otherwise and enough family logistics to keep a small military operation occupied.

Merlin has been engaged in delicate diplomatic negotiations with Tiddles. By "delicate diplomatic negotiations" I mean hissing, glaring, tactical retreats and the occasional performance of Your Existence is Annoying Me! It did not work out, Merlin was trounced and we have retired back to the boat…where his is much happier and was much missed by the dog. He just would not fight back and was all hiss and no trousers.

Somewhere between helping Dad with hospital appointments, showing Mum how technology has changed again while nobody was looking, explaining how apps works, returning Amazon parcels and me attempting to remember which day of the week it actually was, the morning show somehow still happened.

That still surprises me.

The energy continues to arrive in curious waves now. One day I feel almost like my old self. The next, my body politely reminds me that recovering from a stroke is less like climbing a mountain and more like wandering through weather that changes every five minutes.

Yesterday it was the long drive back to the boat. I always underestimate it.

It is not really the driving. It is the concentration, the constant calculations, the traffic, the endless tiny decisions that quietly empty the battery before you even notice….and I got lost missed a junction and had a sense of humour failure. By the time I got back to the boat I felt as though somebody had unplugged me from the mains and left me running on moonlight alone.

So if I occasionally sound slightly dreamlike on the radio... that is probably because I am. Or perhaps I have simply become nocturnal.

The good news is that Dark Moon Rocks keeps quietly growing while I am not looking.

The new app is now live, which still feels slightly surreal. If you visit app.darkmoon.rocks, you can install it straight onto the home screen of your phone just like any other app. No hunting through browsers, no searching for bookmarks, no wondering where I have disappeared to this week.

Just one little moon icon waiting patiently for you.

Inside you will find the radio, podcasts, links, and all the strange little pathways that continue to grow out of this wonderfully odd project.

One tiny step at a time. That seems to be how everything is built these days. Not in great dramatic leaps...

...but by quietly putting one stone in front of another until, one morning, you realise you have somehow built an entire lighthouse.

If you are reading this on your phone, you can even add the app to your Home Screen so Dark Moon Rocks sits there like any other app, ready whenever you fancy disappearing down a rabbit hole.

Thank you, as always, for wandering these moonlit paths with me. I genuinely would not want to be making this strange little world with anyone else.

The Moon is up. The kettle is on. The radio is waiting.

There has been rather a lot happening behind the scenes this week.

Dark Moon Oracle is now open for bookings once again. If you have been waiting for a tarot reading, you can now book directly through the website at a time that suits you. I wanted the whole process to be as simple as possible, so no complicated forms or endless emails backwards and forwards.

The Dark Moon Rocks website has grown into into the central hub for everything I create. Whether you are looking for the radio, podcasts, books, blogs, newsletters, readings or the latest experiments escaping from the Chaos Laboratory, you should be able to find them all from one place.

The Ko-fi Shop is now up and running too. Alongside supporting the project, you can now commission bespoke graphics and artwork. Whether you need something mystical, magical, atmospheric or completely off the wall, I am now opening commissions once again.

If you have installed the new Dark Moon Rocks App, you will find all of these links there too. The app has become a little doorway into my world. One tap and everything is waiting for you, whether you are listening to the radio, booking a reading or wandering through the latest blog posts.

Looking ahead, I am quietly excited about the next adventure.

The plan is to bring Dark Moon Rocks Radio to TikTok Live every weekday morning. If all the technology decides to behave itself, I will be broadcasting the morning show live, chatting about the Moon, folklore, strange ideas, psychology, the occasional philosophical rabbit hole and, of course, offering free tarot readings throughout the show.

If the technology gods smile kindly upon me, I would also love to broadcast simultaneously to YouTube and Facebook. That may take a little more tinkering, a few cables, several cups of coffee and probably at least one session of muttering at the computer, but we are getting closer every week.

As always, this project grows one experiment at a time. Some ideas flourish immediately. Others require a little gentle persuasion. Either way, the adventure continues... and I am very glad you are travelling with me.

Join me in the Laboratory of Chaos…

Well... the newsletter is a day late.

Yesterday I arrived back at the boat after the long drive from my parents' house and simply hit a wall. I keep forgetting that recovery does not negotiate. Some days I can work for hours, ideas bouncing around like fireworks. Other days I unlock the boat, make a cup of tea, stare vaguely into the middle distance and discover that my brain has quietly clocked off for the evening.

Yesterday was one of those days. So, thank you for your patience.

Something else happened this week that made me think it was time to pull back the curtain a little.

Some of you know I use ChatGPT as part of my creative process. Recently an article I wrote was identified by an AI detector as being heavily AI assisted. At first that stung a little. Then, after thinking about it, I realised it was actually a fascinating lesson.

The reality is much messier than people imagine.

Very little begins with artificial intelligence. It begins with me.

It starts as whisper notes recorded while walking the towpath, scribbled notebooks, half-finished thoughts, observations from the morning radio show, conversations with friends, or the strange ideas that appear at two o'clock in the morning when sensible people are asleep.

Then I throw the whole glorious mess at ChatGPT.

It helps me untangle it. Sometimes it finds a better structure. Sometimes it spots where I have wandered off into the weeds. Sometimes it simply reminds me what I was trying to say in the first place.

Then I rewrite it.

I change words. I alter the rhythm. I swap American spellings back into proper British English. I remove contractions because I have always preferred "do not" to "don't". I balance the sentences until they sound like me again. Quite often I rewrite whole paragraphs because they simply do not feel right.

It is less like asking someone else to write for me, and more like having a very patient editor who never gets tired of my organised chaos.

Perhaps that is why these newsletters have become such an odd mixture of Kate and artificial intelligence.

The ideas are mine. The life experiences are certainly mine. The stories are mine. The strange sense of humour is definitely mine.

The occasional tidy paragraph may have had a helping hand before I promptly dismantled it and rebuilt it in my own peculiar way.

Recovery from the stroke has taught me something unexpected.

My imagination is still overflowing. My curiosity certainly has not gone anywhere. What has changed is that organising those thoughts can sometimes feel like trying to herd moonbeams into a cardboard box.

Having a tool that helps me gather those scattered pieces together means I can spend more energy creating instead of wrestling with the mechanics.

That feels like a fair trade.

Perhaps that is the future of writing. Not artificial intelligence replacing creativity, but helping people whose ideas outrun their concentration.

In many ways, this newsletter has become a laboratory.

Some experiments fail spectacularly. Some songs surprise me. Some ideas grow into books. Some become radio shows.

And some simply remind me that creating something imperfect is infinitely better than waiting for perfection that never arrives.

Thank you for continuing to wander through this strange little laboratory with me.

There are many more experiments to come.
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The Moon is now a waxing gibbous, around eighty-five per cent illuminated, quietly gathering herself before the Full Moon arrives on 29th July. It is travelling through Sagittarius, a sign traditionally associated with exploration, learning and seeing beyond the next horizon. Whether you read that astrologically or simply enjoy the poetry of it, there is something fitting about looking further than the immediate problem in front of you.

The Sun has stepped confidently into Leo, bringing warmth, creativity and a gentle reminder not to hide your own light beneath practicality. Mercury remains in Cancer, encouraging conversations that come from the heart rather than from rehearsed scripts, while Venus has settled into Virgo, quietly favouring small acts of kindness over grand gestures. Mars continues its journey through Gemini, making ideas arrive faster than our ability to write them all down. Saturn is almost stationary in Aries, as though pausing before its next lesson, while Neptune and Pluto continue their slow retrograde dance, inviting us to question old dreams, worn-out identities and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are becoming.

Perhaps that is the message of this week. You do not need to have the entire map. Just the courage to take the next step, the curiosity to keep asking questions, and enough wonder left to look up at the Moon now and then.

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