Exile Chapter 25 rewrites

I've finished chapter 25 of the second draft of Exile and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

Soooo, one whole chapter of usable text from the first draft, and now I'm back to completely rewriting chapters. That was a nice short break from doing actual work. Oh well.

The first draft of this chapter was from Silmera's point of view, which makes very little sense for the standpoint of a writer. The far more interesting character in this scene is Mal, because of the emotion he's going to feel over having basically murdered seventy of his fellow villagers by accident. Seeing though his eyes as this is revealed to him is far more interesting than seeing through Silmera's. It helps the reader to sympathize with him as having had this horrible thing happen to him, rather than to see him through someone else's eyes that is wary of him and thinks he's done something horrible.

Because of the viewpoint change, and several very major changes in the actual plot, this chapter had to be completely rewritten from scratch. I have to say that it's better this way than it was before, but it still needs work, as I sort of threw it together on the fly. Oh well, that's what third drafts are for . . . and fourth drafts . . . and fifth drafts . . . and sixth drafts . . . and so on.

Something I'm trying to do with this book is mimick one of my favorite authors. He does a ton of character developement and building up in the first two thirds to three fourths of the book, and then all of the action just crashes down on you in the final third or fourth of the book. I've done all the character building and set up, so all that is left is the action. I really like how he does that, and I've really wanted to try and duplicate it, so I chose this story to do it with as it was one that could be molded to that sort of framework. It's pretty much just battle after battle after battle for the rest of the story, with a few brief spots for the characters to take a bit of a breather. Anyway, if you'd like to see what I'm talking about, read Elantris or Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.

The first draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 184,468 words which is over a 67,000 word difference.