Exile End of Part 3

sooooo, helping my cousin move, but first I'm using my uncle's computer to post the chapter of Exile I finished last night BWAAHAAHAA. I finished up Exile Chapter 34 last night but it was really really late so I didn't put it up until now. You can downloade it, if you feel so inclined, at the bottom of this page.

This chapter is the end of Part Three: Exiled, as there is a one month break in the story between this chapter and the next while Mal is in a coma. The story jumps ahead because nothing happens. Aaron, Lilia, Anna and Silmera sit around waiting for Mal to wake up. Patrick moves north. The Samirreh strengthen their hold on the North and begin pounding away at the magical barriers placed around Avalon by the first Council of Wizards. Rather than give you the boring details of everyone repositioning to serve the plot, I spare you by skipping ahead a month to where things start happening again. As I've said before, this story is long enough as it is. It's over 315k words now. Which, if you're keeping score, is as long as the first four Harry Potter books combined.

Chapter 34 has quite a bit of action in it. It's mostly fighting with a bit of introversion from Mal at the beginning. This chapter needed a crapton of work because most of hte action was incoherent garbage that was indecipherable even to me, the one that actually wrote it. But everything makes sense now and flows along well. Took forever to get this fight tweaked enough to make sense, but it was really worth it. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but this chapter is pretty awesome now. ^^V

With this story I took the approach of building up the characters, the world, the situation, the villains, and all of that at first before much of anything else happened, trying to build a relationship between the characters and the person reading about them, and making hte world as real as it possibly can to you. I saved all of the action for the latter half of the story on purpose so that when it finally starts to happen you actually care about the people its happening to. I've never done that in a story before. I was actually trying out what Brandon Sanderson does with his books to see how it would work for me. The problem with this story is that it didn't really fit his mold where everything builds up until the very end and then comes crashing down. So i built up for the first half and now with the second half things start rolling faster and faster until they hit the end. That way of doing things really fits this story well I think, you get to know everyone and then BAM everything that can possibly go wrong does, and then they struggle through to win.

Going back to the three act play story template, we're still in the second act. The enemy has taken the North, Avalon is within their grasp, they've completed thier gigantic magical symbol on the Four Kingdoms, Mal has been exiled, and now he's been turned into a Samirreh. And there's still some bad luck to come in the next few chapters before our characters can finally start overcoming and triumphing in act 3.