Exile Chapter 25 draft 4

I've finally found the time to finish the fourth draft of Exile Chapter 25 and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

This chapter is the beginning of Part 3: Exiled. Four years have passed to the day from when the last chapter ended. Again, I split the story into parts to prevent confusion on the time jumps. You have a break in the story where it says end of part two, beginning of part 3 4 years later, to tell you that this time has passed, and a short bit of Silmera thinking back on what has happened between chapter 24 an chapter 25. The reason for this is very simple, nothing interesting happened in them, and the story is already too long as it is. Silmera tells you everything that you need to know about what happened during the time that I skipped over.

This chapter needed quite a bit of work, as there were many things that were very vague that needed to not be vague. One of those things is Mal's skill with a sword. I never actually said how good he is in previous drafts, and then all of a sudden he whips it out and is epically awesome with it out of nowhere. He was trained extremely hard by a supernatural being so his skills are a step above those of someone trained by a human because he had to adapt to her greater speed and strength, and find ways around them to make beating her possible for someone of his phyiscal abilities. Silmera tells us this in this draft so there's no confusion about his skills. He's not the greatest swordsman in the world by far, as is proven in the ending when he fights a Fayt, but he's good enough to give all but a handful a good fight.

There were several other really vague things that were clarified and such, from here on there are going to be a lot more edits because this is where the storylines start to come together, and there were a lot of continuity errors created by that.

On other news, my Agent has given me a deadline of the end of march to finish Exile, and I'm pretty sure I can make it. He is extremely pleased with the changes I made in the second and third drafts and thinks that he will have a much easier time selling it than he is having selling Beyond the Lost Horizon. The biggest difference is that Exile is just a much better written and thought out story, with really good pacing, some things that were not so apparent in BTLH. Plus he says it's usually easier to sell a book that doesn't have a happy ending to a publisher because it's something that goes against the norm, and publishers like to see that every now and again. So, aparently I'm getting better at this whole writing thing. Hopefully I can get good enough to start selling some books and quit my craptastic day job. not that it's really all that craptastic, it's just not what I really want to do with my life.