Exile Chapter 27 rewrites

I've finished chapter 27 of the second draft of Exile and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

This chapter is basically two pieces that I cut from different parts of the first draft and rewrote into one chapter here while the characters are taking time to recover from tehir wounds. They are both important events, but they were in bad places for the flow of the story in the first draft, and they were pretty poorly written. Not much of the original text from the first draft was used because of the graphic nature of some of it, and the extremely vague description I gave before of what the Oracle actually does.

First we have An explanation of who the Oracle is, what she does, and her importance. Her role was always this defined to me, I just did a HORRIBLE job of explaining it in the first draft. And the revelation that Mal has been dreaming about her for his entire life is made as well, just to confirm what a clever person could have already figured out on his or her own. Mal also notices that when Silmera isn't working at being gruff and stony she is actually very pretty in her own way, which is a small but important detail to the ending.

Second we have Silmera's naughty time, shall we call it, with Mal. In the first draft this part was really kind of graphic and done with pretty bad taste. I think I've done a pretty good job of rewriting it so that you get a really good idea about what's happening, without my having to describe the details of it to you. Sometimes subtle is much, much better than descriptive, and this is one of those times. I focus more on Mal's feelings of insecurity and humiliation rather than what is actually happening to him. Now, There are people on both sides of the argument for sex scenes in books and movies and TV and all, some say it's necessary for the plot, some say it doesn't belong in any story. Me, I believe that as the child concieved in this chapter is extremely important and is the main force driving Silmera for the rest of the book, and I always like to follow the rule that showing is better than telling. which means having the scene, rather than having one of them remembering it later. Either way I've really, really toned it down for this draft, and I'm happy with the changes that I've made.

The first draft of this story ended at 117.352 words.
The second draft is currently at 188,834 words.