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I’m posting this as I write my novel, so that word count won’t last long. Still, I am very much in the orange “danger” zone. If that bar turns red than I will be “critical” and in danger of not being able to complete the novel. However, in a flash of insight I didn’t even realize I had, it can only turn red if I am 50% behind with less than half of the month to go. At least, I think. I had originally programmed it to turn red if I had written less than half of the target words by that day, but I am currently in that situation and the bar is still orange. I guess I just messed up the code. While I mull over the currently foriegn concept of “catching up,” you can read another exciting and utterly random excerpt from Megalomania!

“We have reports of planetary seizures from Aldeberan IIB, Kumari Ni, and Eiger’s Rock.”

The last planet in the list caused Samantha Bates to do a double-take.

“Eiger’s Rock isn’t a planet, sir” she said, looking up at the main communication screen.

Her commander, an admiral in the Centauran Fleet, simply shrugged. “You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to.”

That may have been, except this was more a case of “you say po-tay-to, I say julienne fries.” Even though the definition of what constituted a planet was pretty solid, some people just wouldn’t accept the fact that a fragment of a previously whole planet was not a planet itself. Further, the fragment of a fragment was even less of a planet. Eiger’s Rock was just that.

Dr Jerome Eiger, a brilliant scientist with a bit too much free time, believed he had developed a way of blowing up an entire planet. The Integrated Association of Planets, a group of like minded planetary governments spanning the better part of the known galaxy, was not all that thrilled with the idea. Their main task was to make sure that everybody got along as well as humanly possible, but they also existed to ensure that the bare minimum of planets exploded, zero being the target number. Eiger was very adamant that they let him test his method. Threats were made, Eiger was arrested, tried, and jailed, and everybody thought the whole ordeal was over. A few months later, Eiger escaped. A few weeks after that, Solo, the only planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, exploded into a dozen pieces. Mere days followed, and the pieces suddenly shattered into millions of tiny fragments. Eiger was blamed for the explosion, though he was never found, presumed to be killed in the destruction of Solo. The fragments continued to crumble, until a single large chunk reamined. This piece was roughly as large as Earth’s moon and horribly mishapen. It came to be know as Eiger’s Rock, and was not by any means a planet. It seemed, however, that it was a target for megalomaniacs.