Thursday, May 6, 2010

Exile Chapter 13 rewrites

I've finished the second draft of Exile Chapter 13 and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

This chapter has also changed significantly. Originally Silmera planned to have Mal "accidently" come across her bathing. This is something that no woman would ever do, so i changed it to it being just an accident. I've also changed the descriptions in this chapter to be both at the same time less graphic and more descriptive. It seems like you can't do one without the other, but it's possible. Also changed were a lot of Mal's emotional responses. He was rather wooden in the first draft, and that just wouldn't be the case in real life if he walked past and basically saw one of his sex fantasies happening right there. I let a female friend of mine read this chapter before posting it and she basically told me I was overdoing it a bit, because a fourteen year old boy is not going to have those sorts of feelings yet, BUT my response was "you've obviously never been a fourteen year old boy."

A great deal of description about the world around the characters, the characters themselves, and their emotions has been added to this story, as well as a crapton of new dialog to reflect the changes, as well as make the character interactions here more meaningful. I've also ramped up Mal's suspicion of Silmera, because she has lied to him, several times, and she happens to belong to a race of people that are hated and feared. A fourteen year old boy is old enough to have naughty fantasies, certainly, and definitely old enough to begin to question, and choose what he wants to believe. This is going to be a big focus for the story that I'm introducing in teh second draft. Mal is going to be constantly wondering how far he can trust Silmera, and also added to this draft, Silmera has a psychological need to prove herself due to who her mother was (that's right, i planned all that out ahead of time, I'm not making these changes up as I go along)

The next chapter will deal greatly with Mal's internal struggle over whether or not he can trust Silmera, and whether or not he dares not to.

The first draft of this story was 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 141,605 words, which is a diference of just over 24,000 words.

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