Writer’s Resource: Create a calendar (with moon phases!) for any month in history

There was a full moon on June 28 and July 29, 1768. The new moon fell on July 13.

Have you ever wondered what day of the week a historical event happened? Or what about what kind of moon was in the sky during that blustery February in eastern North Carolina when the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge was fought?

Well, now you can have your answers.

I got the idea to actually plot out a calendar for the characters in my book from Outlining Your Novel by K.M. Weiland. I thought it was a brilliant way to keep track of key events in the story, as well as when certain periods of time start and stop, without having to constantly refer back to a list of dates.

Problem was, I didn’t have any calendars for the mid-1760s just laying around the house, nor did my calendar in Outlook seem to offer an easy way to jump back nearly 250 years in the past to track events.

TimeandDate.com to the rescue! On that site, I was able to create calendars for the monthss during which my novel takes place in 1765. I can also create monthly calendars for events in my characters’ back stories. Not only do I now have a calendar I can mark up with the events in my characters’ lives, but I can also know what days of the week things happened, as well as what the moon phases were — an especially helpful trick if you’re writing about two sweethearts under a full moon, or an ambush by highwaymen on a pitch black night in the pocosin.

Unless you are writing a novel that uses stardates like the original Star Trek series, you could likely benefit from making a calendar for the events in your novel, too.