Eclipse and Writing

I managed to haul myself out of bed at 4:30-ish this morning in order to see the total lunar eclipse.  When I poked my head of of the door, the moon had a dark bite out of it, and small puffs of cloud skirted over it.  I spent the next quarter of an hour alternately gazing from our deck at the moon in various types and aspects of cover and resting on the couch until it looked like the eclipse was going to be visible through the clouds.  Then I woke up Mark.

The shadowed parts of the moon glowed a kind of rusty orange.  Sometimes it glowed; other times it was a dull brown.  A shrinking sliver of silver at the base made the moon look like a smouldering ember on a silver plate, or like an Egyptian Barque of the Moon.  Then the clouds would cover the moon, and all that could be seen of the moon was a half-closed eye.  

The sliver of light on the moon shifted as the moon traveled through the Earth's umbra, and just before totality, the cloud cover rolled over the show and no further view of the eclipse was possible.  So we went back to bed.

On the writing front...

I've given myself a deadline of May 1 to write a 90,000 word novel.  I suppose if I think of it as nine 10,000 word stories it might actually happen.  In order for this to work, I'm going to have to pound out 1500 words a day for the next three moons.  The new moon is right after Valentines day.  The next full moon is March 2.  The secod new moon is St. Patricks, and the second full moon is March 31.  The third new moon is Tax Day, and the 3rd is May 1, the Ides of Spring.  When I announced my intention to Mark, he was ... pragmatic.

Of course, yesterday's word count was a whopping 350.  But I finally ditched Jerick's larger hand-axes for smaller throwing hatchets.  I guess I'll have different members of the Order of the Axe use different types of axes.

Oh. I got a rejection for a short story yesterday.  Yay.