Exile Chapter 36 Rewrites

I've finished chapter 36 of teh second draft of Exile and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

This chapter is almost the exact length of the chapter that it's replacing, it's only about 9 words shorter. That's a little odd in my oinion, cosindering how completely different they are from each other. Mal is forced to trust the Dark God in order to rescue Silmera from the Samirreh and to get to Avalon before the barriers are broken and the Samirreh begin to swarm into the ruins.

The original draft of this chapter was awful. It was full of a lot of confusing, non-descriptive, and etremely unbelievable action. I don't care how awesome the Exile working with the power of the Dark God is, he's not going to be able to fight off an entire army of Samirreh that are waiting for him in broad daylight and have a hostage at knifepoint. True, his mother pulled off a similar feat at the beginning of the book, but she had the Exile's Moon enhancing her powers, the cover of darkness, and surprise on her side, not to mention years of experience that Mal does not have, and if you'll rememeber she didn't exactly survive the encounter either. If you'd like to read that sort of drivel go download the first draft on my website. If you'd rather have a more believeable fight of one on seven with a Fayt in charge that picked his seven least competant in order to have a go at bribing the Exile into his service, read the second draft, which is much better written and structured, and most of all, far more believable than the fight I had at this point in the first draft.

This chapter is really the beginning of where the first and second drafts are going to start diverging into different endings. There will be a few small similarities in the second draft to the first draft, but literally the entire ending is new to this draft. It's taken me almost a year to come up with everything that's going to happen here. I've put a lot of work into making something that is both exciting and fulfilling to read, two things that the first draft really lacked. I relied too much on an emotional gimick in the first draft to make the ending memorable, and forgot to put anything resembling excitement an substance into it, and I failed to fulfill some of the promises that I made at the beginning of the story, which is a big no no. Basically an ending should fulfill all promises made during the story, and tie everything up nice and neat with a big bow with as big a bang as you can possibly manage without straining credulity. I think I've got just the thing to do all three.

The first draft was really riding on the back story from a book I hand wrote in composition books way back in freakin' HIGH SCHOOL, (yes I still have these composition books and no you can't read them) and the idea that two characters that are barely in this book would go on into Spires of Infinity. I think I've really made it it's own story this time around, and given it the attention that it needs in order to be a good story that people actually want to sit down and read. I've had more than a few people tell me how crap the first draft was, myself being one of them, I hope that I can change a few minds with the second draft.

The first draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 200,407 words.