Exile Chapter 21 rewrites

I've finished the second draft of Exile Chapter 21 and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

This is another new chapter that takes the place of a chapter from teh first draft. In this case I've thrown out he original chapter for the reasons that Mal and Silmera's relationship has changed, which makes the events of the first draft of this chapter impossible. I needed another way to force Silmera's hand in using magic to call the Fayt to her, and a dying child is just the sort of thing she can never ignore. If there's one thing Silmera will put her life on the line for without fail, it is a child in need. I also decided for the village to learn that she is a Heretic, and to accept her because of her healing of the child. This makes the events of the coming night even harder for her to endure. She feels very grateful to these people for allowing her to remain, even knowing that she's a Heretic, and she will want to protect them if she can. In the first draft she didn't have any underlying motives directing her actions and I needed to give her a reason to protect the village.

The first draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 171,479 words.

That is a difference of over 54,000 words.

The coming chapters have a lot more material that I'll be able to keep, so I'll not be writing so many entirely new chapters to replace them. One thing, however, that will be changing, and quite drastically, is the ending. The original ending was rather flat, boring, and anti-climactic. The new ending that I've come up with has a lot more action, a lot more emotional impact, a plot twist, some personal sacrifice, an epic duel or two, and a much better battle sequence. The entire ending is probably going to be completely rewritten from scratch, because there are just going to be too many changes to keep even a little bit of the text from the first draft.

I've put a lot of work into putting this ending together over the last year or so, because the ending is really the most important part of the book. Your book can be the best book in teh world, but if the ending sucks everyone will hate it. People are more likely to enjoy a crappy book with a spectacular ending than they are a spectacular book with a crappy ending. The ending can make or break a book, and I think that my new ending is really, really good. I've already started laying hte groundwork for these changes in the ending almost as far back as the beginning with Silmera's trying to figure out exactly what the Fayts are, and with Shayla's thoughts about the traitor Wizard. It's going to be awesome . . . or at least I think so. It should be a good sign to you that I'm excited about the end, because if I wasn't it would probably be a good sign that it sucked.