Exile Chapter 7 rewrites

I've finished the second draft of Exile Chapter 7 and you can download it at the bottom of thi page.

This chapter has been almost entirely rewritten. There are several reasons for this. First, because Silmera was a rather one dimensional character in the first draft I wanted to give her more depth and motivation, hence her quest to prove that she is not the monster that her mother was. Also, she came to the Hidden Valley in the first draft with no real plan of action beyond find the boy and the Wizard. That is not how Silmera thinks. She likes to plan things through carefully, because she does not like unexpected consequences. She is often inpulsive, and she sees the damage that not thinking things through can do. Plus it's been fourteen years. Even the worst planner would have come up with SOMETHING at least, after fourteen years.

There was also a large section of this chapter where Silmera looks into a mirror so I can give you a physical description. It was really long and pointless. Also, one thing I've realized is that when a person looks into a mirror, they see themselves, and nothing more. THey don't sit there and describe themselves feature by feature, because they've seen themselves a thousand times a thousand times, and don't need to. There's two ways to get around this, either describe them through someone else's eyes (which I already did) or give subtle hints, like the habit of constantly brushing hair out of her face to indicate it's long and unruly, or having her place a hand on her flat hard belly to indicate that she is both thin and muscular. etc.

Also, Silmera has very low self-esteem. She believes in herself as a warrior, but not as a woman. She doesn't think of herself as attractive, and assumes that no one else does because of that. Now, I'm far from an expert on women, but one thing I've noticed is that if a woman believes herself attractive, she thinks that everyone else must see her as such as well, and if she believes herself unattractive, then anyone telling her otherwise is lying to make her feel better, or patronize her in some way. Silmera finds herself unattractive to the point of almost wishing she wasn't a woman at all, and she doesn't see how anyone could ever find her beautiful like she used to be when she was a child. She avoids looking into mirrors because she doesn't want to be reminded of the fact that she thinks herself ugly. She has some serious insecurity issues, and that never really came out in the first draft.

You may have also noticed that I am chopping most of these chapters up into smaller pieces. All of the chapters were gigantic before, and editing them is making them even bigger, so I'm dividing them into pieces at places where I feel a chapter break would not go amiss.

The first draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft of this story is currently at 128,787 words.

That's nearly an 11,500 word difference, and I just started what was chapter 3 of the first draft. To give an idea of how much 11,500 words is, that is the equivilant of 20 single spaced pages at 12 point font. I've added 20 pages to the first 3 chapters of the first draft.