Roberson's Report, Feb 17: 795

I finished "Wonder House" yesterday morning, which is what I ended up titling the new Israel-centric Celestial Empire story. The final word-count came in just south of 4K words, which means I only did 795 new words on Tuesday. (Well, actually it was probably closer to 1500, since I chopped out a bunch of Monday's work when I decided to restructure it a bit, but there's no clean way of tallying the revisions so I'm just going with the final number.)

Here's a bit from the new section, just because.

“What am I looking at here?” Yacov asked, scanning down the first of the handwritten pages, wincing at Segal’s questionable penmanship. The kid wrote in Official Speech, but was so shaky with the pen that it looked like it could have been meant to be Yiddish.

“We’ve got this idea for a character…” Kurtzberg began.

“He’s from the future, see,” Segal cut in, hands on Yacov’s desk and leaning forward eagerly. “He’s the son of the last man on Earth, and he gets sent back in this time machine just before the red sun explodes!”

Itzhak held up a pen-and-ink sketch of a muscled figure holding a car up over his head. “Come on, a car? Really?”

“Gravity’s stronger in the future,” Kurtzberg answered, a touch of defiance in his tone. “So when he comes back to the present day it’s like, what if there was a guy who was as strong as an Earth-man is on the moon… but here on Earth? He can make big jumps, pick up cars, that kind of thing.”

“I don’t know, guys…” Yacov pulled another cigarette from the pack in his pocket, and lit it from a table-lighter. “The future?”

The rest of the day was spent with administrivia, as is today. Hopefully in the next day or two I can start work on the new novel in earnest, and at least post some real numbers before the month is out.