Exile Chapter 41 Rewrites

I've finished chapter 41 of the second draft of Exile and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

This is another pretty long chapter. Silmera has a few adventures in captivity, and ends up tracing a giant spell in Avalon for Fayt Nightfang with her own blood. The name of this chapter, The Bloody Crest, is a nod at Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, strangely, this actually has a bit of similarity with the ending of FMA: B, but not too much (I only just saw the end a week or two ago, and had this ending plotted out a while before that). We learn why Fayt Nightfang wanted Silmera, or at least part of it, i haven't given you everything yet. Mostly this is just a chapter to tell you what's happening with Silmera while Mal is gathering his army. It's really my last chance to make you sympathize with her and I took whole advantage. She's never had a lot of things in her life, and I let her have a small bit of what she's missed, even if the company leaves a little to be desired. A few small mysteries are given answers here if you look for them, but will be explained in greater detail later if you miss them.

This is it for set up. Now starts the avalanche. The pace is going to start speeding up considerably from here. I purposely moved slowly and deliberately in the buildup here to the ending. TO make things feel like they're accelerating the style of writing is going to change a little, some of which I've already begun. Instead of sticking with one character in one location and one event for an entire chapter as i've done my best to stick to thus far, I'm now going to be having several different characters' points of view per chapter, and keep bouncing around from location to location, event to event, and the chapters will start to get shorter so you get a feeling of things speeding up and chaos, additionally, as I already stated, I'll be bringing in the point of view of several characters other than the two characters that the story is about to further mix things up.

The first draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 220,016 words.

Ok, I never actually thought that the second draft of this story would exceed 100,000 words added. That's pretty crazy when you think about it. That's a middling sized mainstrem novel right there. That really goes to show how craptastic that first draft really was. And on another note, I've written 30,000 words of new material this week alone. I'm trying very hard to make the end of july deadline I set for myself. Needless to say, I haven't had much of a social life this week. I work, I come home, I write, I sleep. Every so often I find time to eat and shower. To give you an idea of what all I've done this week, I wrote 5 chapters to replace 2. I read those two chapters, found any existing text that could still be used, then wrote my new text around it. I spellcheck every chapter after completing it, and read through to make sure that spellcheck got everything. I've spent about 8-10 hours per day this week working on it in addition to 5-8 hours of actual work at my day job. Each chapter takes anywhere from 5-10 hours to complete. I think I can actually feel myself getting fatter with all the sitting around I've been doing this week haha, next week I'm definitely going to make the time to exercise, because I can definitely feel the lack. It's amazing how different you feel when you're exercising regularly and then stop for a week. So yeah, I recently discovered like a few months ago that exercise+fruit=awesome who'da thunk?