Exile Chapter 35 Rewrites

I've finished chapter 35 of the second draft of Exile and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

All right, now that I've got my computer troubles sorted out, and reinstalled everything, I'm back to working on Exile. I'm extremely annoyed at this setback, as it might cause me to miss my goal of finishing before the end of july.

This chapter, and the one before it, basically take the place of a ton of just spuerfluous, pointless junk that I had in this section of the first draft. A lot of things happened while Mal was visiting the Northern Sage that really didn't need to, and so I've cut them all out, and made this part of the story a little more compact (even though the word count has actually grown ha ha). The only things that really needed to happen here were Mal had to be told how to defeat the Samirreh, and really just make his choice of what he's going to do, and decide why he's going to do it. He hadn't really dealt with all of his issues, but he's finally got them somewhat under control to the point where they're not ruling his life anymore. Those were really the only things that needed to happen here, and I had just a ton of other crap that really didn't need to be there, and really had no point to the story at hand. Some of the original text from the first draft has survived in this chapter, but not very much.

Anyway, now is where the ending really starts to change, from here on out, I'll basically be rewriting the entire thing. Before this point you could set the first draft and the second draft side by side, and though there are great differences, they're still the same story. From here on out that will no longer be possible, this is a completely different ending to the story, and it will bear very little resemblance at all to the original ending that I wrote.

The first draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 200,416 words.

And there we have it, with an 83k word increase I've broken the 200k mark. I originally started writing this story because I was fed up with agents telling me that Beyond the Lost Horizon was too long and they weren't interested because of that. It was supposed to be a short, fun little adventure sort of thing, which has now grown to neary twice its original size. Now it has become longer than the final draft of Beyond the Lost Horizon. Of course I haven't even tried to cut anything out of it yet, and there will be cuts, oh yes, there will be cuts. Nothing will really be cut out of the story, except for maybe some things that really don't belong, what will change is the wording. I'll change the wording to say the same thing in fewer words. It'll read easier, look cleaner, and basically be the exact same story told in fewer words. Nothing will actually be cut, it'll just be more compact. I wanted to try and cut it down to 150k, but that might be too small. the final draft may end up somewhere around 175k.