Starfire Chapter 14

Sooooo, after a long while of wasting my life playing Diablo III, which I got for my birthday, I'm back to writing and have completed Chapter 14 of the first draft of Starfire and you can find it at the bottom of this page.

Character development for Jake and Crowley, and a new headache for Karen.  I've hit the 60,000 word mark with this chapter.  This story is going to be a lot longer than I expected it to be.  My original outline of the story did not include any of the stuff dealing with the investigations into the nuclear launch, but, as I was writing it, I realized that Karen is the sort of person that isn't going to just let something like that happen.  She's not going to be able to live with herself until she proves it wasn't someone under her command that did it while she wasn't looking.  And that added something like 20,000 extra words to the story. 

At this point in the story, there's no real villain, and I did that on purpose.  You've got two sides who have equally good reasons for fighting the war.  Neither one of them is the right side or the wrong side.  They both have good points and bad, and we've got a main character from each.  This is really what I'm kind of going for anyway, I hope it comes out like that in the story.  This is kind of my view on war.  There are no right sides or wrong sides a lot of the time, just a lot of people throwing their lives away because their governments tell them to.  A villain will emerge soon though, for the sake of a completely awesome ending.  But what I really wanted to do with this story is show how this guy becomes the villain, and why, instead of having a clear cut, black and white good vs. evil story.  Because in this story it's all more shades of gray and ambiguity as to who is truly right and who is truly wrong.  Well, and there is a mastermind behind it all, of course, but she doesn't have much to do until the very last chapter.