Exile Chapter 10 rewrites

I've finished the second draft of Exile Chapter 10 and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

This is a very long chapter, made more so by my editing, and there was really nowhere that I could cut it into pieces to make it shorter. Not very much has changed at all in this chapter because the majority of it is dialogue, and most of the dilogue that I've wrote out in the first draft needed few changes to it.

Something I try to keep away from is dumping a gigantic history lesson of the world I'm creating on top of the reader in my stories. Though it's usually fascinating to me to know the origins of everything in the world, it gets rather boring for other people. However, with this chapter I felt I needed to tell the story of the Demon Queen Marael, because it sort of bridges some gaps between this story and both Beyond the Lost Horizon, and Heretic Twilight (which I have not yet written, but have planned out). You see how everything is connected, not by common characters and such as a normal series might be, but by the evil entity of the Dark God. Even though these stories have not been written/completed yet, they will be eventully, and I wanted something that would prove an interesting bit of back story in this book as a stand alone, as well as tie all the others that come before it in the storyline together. Plus, you get to see how one act that, at the time will seem like a triumph, can turn out to be a horrible mistake that costs the lives of many people. I think that the story of Marael is interesting and relevant enough, and the setting and way it is told in this chapter, that I'll be forgiven for breaking one of the cardinal rules of writing epic fantasy. Most fantasy writers do it once or twice in their careers anyway, so no biggie... I hope.

I suppose I should give a bit of a spoiler warning, one event at the end of book three of the beyond the lost horizon trilogy is given away, and pretty much the entire basic storyline of Heretic Twilight is given in a nutshell. In my opinion reading these will not ruin those stories for you (and it will likely be a very long time before I get around to writing them anyway, so it's hardly very iportant anyway).

Also, something you might find interesting. I went on an LDS mission in 2002, and that was about the time I started to put together the story of Heretic Twilight. It was somewhat influenced by the release of Star Wars Episode 2 a few months earlier. During my mission I had this story coming together in the back of my mind in my free time, and when I got home the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI came out. I named my character in that game Marael, after the lead character in Heretic Twilight. It was not until a year or two later that I got the idea for Beyond the Lost Horizon (influenced by the anime Orphen btw, though I'm pretty sure it ended up nothing like Orphen in the end, especially when you take books 2 and 3 into account) and began tying it in to my gigantic mental timeline. I chose to write that one first because it was less complicated and at that time I was still struggling to learn how to write (evidenced by the fact that it took me an entire five years from the day that I started it to the day the final draft of Beyond the Lost Horizon was completed) so a less complicated story was preferable to a more complicated one that I might ruin with my lack of skill.

The first draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 133,165 words.

That is almost a 16,000 word difference in what were just the first four chapters of the first draft. That is the equivilant of 4 added chapters, and over 25 single spaced 12 point font pages.