Spires of Infinity Chapter 45 and Epilogue

So I called in sick today, because I REALLY needed a day off this week, and I spent the day writing. I've finished the first draft of Spires of Infinity Chapter 45 and the Epilogue. They can be downloaded at the bottom of this page. I have also uploaded a file of the entire first draft if you would prefer to grab that rather than individual chapters. The full first draft includes several small edits that I've made while writing that are not present in the individual chapters.

In this chapter the battle ends, the paradox hits, and all loose ends are tied up. In the epilogue I make the ending a little ambiguous. I did this on purpose. Sometime in the future I may want to write more about these characters and this universe, so I'm giving myself an in for that, without actually really saying that the story isn't over. A lot of writers do this, it's kind of a way of saying that life will go on for the characters even if the books don't. This epilogue is basically an alternate prologue that I wrote for this story that I dicided would better serve things at the end rather than the beginning. I've done some editing to make it fit at the end.

The first draft ended at 166,888 words. That's almost 47k more than I originally expected. Over the next two or three drafts the count will probably swell to something near 200k, and in the final draft I'm going to try to condense it down to 150k.

Now that the first draft is completed I find that it's better to move on for a few weeks and work on something else before coming back and beginning the work of editing and rewriting. I plan to begin editing work on Exile next. Once I've finished the second draft of that I'll return to Spires of Infinity.