I’m currently reading an excellent novel set in the Boer War by Joyce Koetze which I’m trying to help her get published. It’s an epic story but her structural planning is so good it even includes phases of the moon. Such things give a work a lustrous twinkle of authority. In Joyce’s story, her spies travel in the new moon (will they evade capture?) and her heroine uses the moon to avoid pregnancy (will it work…?).
To find out the phases of the moon for the period you are working on, get ‘QuickPhase’ – a downloadable programme from moonconnector.com. It claims to cover all history. (I’ve yet to get a copy as we’re changing computers soon).
Joyce Kotze
18 Aug 2010Thanks Linda for noticing and mentioning my Moons. A story will be dark without a moon. Even a dark-moon should feature somehwere, at least just say that the moon is absent. I live by the moon; starved and melancholic when she is waning; binged and ecstatic in the waxing week. [I shall omit the emotions of full-moon night!] My Muse rides on the cresent moon and I do my rose-pruning and veggie planting by the phases of the moon.
Moonlight and Madness? No, moon phases are the music of Life.
Joyce.