Exile Chapter 30 & 31 rewrites

I've finished chaters 30 and 31 of the second draft of Exile and they can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

There's a lot going on in these two chapters, without much actually happening. Mostly they deal with what's going on in Mal's mind and his heart. Mal has got so much going on inside of him, that he really just needs to take a break, sit down and deal with some of the emo, before he can really move on and do anything else, or he's just going to be completely useless. He sits down, goes over his options, and comes up with a goal that he hopes will fix at least some of his problems so taht he doesn't have to deal with them anymore.

Mal also has to deal with his questions of who he loves, what he wants out of a relationship with a woman, and whether his marrying Lilia is the right things to do for both of them. Now, love, for me has been a bit of a touchy subject for several years. I dated someone for almost three years, and I was deeply in love with her. Unfortunately, for me, on the night I had planned to propose to her, I saw her kissing another man, whom she had been dating almost the entire time she'd been dating me, and decided to move away to alaska with. Mal's feelings for Silmera are much like what I remember feeling before she ripped out my heart and squashed it under her heels. A feeling like being warm, when everything else is cold. Anyway, ever since that messy and painful breakup I've found that I have a really hard time writing about love between my character, as I've also had trouble even finding the desire to go back out and look for someone else in my own life. I've only recently started dating again, with mixed results, and I think I'm doing a pretty good job of facing a pretty big dilema in the love life of this character. Mal deals with the problem much like many people probably would, he puts it off until later, because he's really got way too much going on to even bother thinking about what he's going to do.

Silmera also takes the opportunity to let Aaron know she's been the one wearing the pants all along, and he's basically been her prison bitch the whole time, dancing on her strings to give her everything she wanted from him. Of course, if he wasn't such an idiot, and prone to breaking his word so often, he might have avoided it.

The first draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 195,282 words.