Spires of Infinite rewrite draft 2

So I've been working hard the last month or so on editing my Spires of Infinity rewrite, and I've finished my second draft.  Not to toot my own horn or anything, but the first draft was pretty solid.  I didn't have a lot of grammar mistakes to fix up, or descriptions to add.  Mostly what went into this draft were more character building moments.  As I was reading through I realized that Gabriel was a pretty weak protagonist in the early parts of the story, and needed to have a more firm and sympathetic goal.  I also added a few explanations of things that I felt were a little too vague, and clarified some of the wording here and there.  I'm up to 103,000 words with this draft and this is 13k over what I want it to be, so on my next draft I'm going to be looking really close at the wording of everything and seeing if I can condense it down to lose those 13k words without cutting any scenes.  I usually do this with every book that I write.  Making the prose tighter and more streamlined to shed a few thousand words.  In my opinion it makes it easier to read, and looks a bit more professional after I'm done doing it.  But since I've been doing nothing but Spires of Infinity for the last 6 months or so, I need a small break from it, so I'm going to be working on my second draft of Memories what never was next before coming back for the next draft of Spires.  Just to sort of distance myself from it for a bit so I can come back at it with a fresh perspective.

Anyway, the second draft of Spires of Inifinity is up on my website And if you plan to read this story, I definitely prefer that you read the new version, even though it isn't complete.  Even though its still being worked on, the new version is a far cry better than the old one.  And, like the first draft, I didn't bother taking the time to convert it from manuscript format to regular format.  That means it's courier font, 12 point, double spaced, and all italics are underlined instead of italicized. 

The Man from Medan

A month or so ago I wrote a short story called The Man from Medan.  I was bored this weekend so i recorded myself reading it and posted it on youtube.  If you feel the great urge to listen to my doofy voice badly narrating this story you can find the playlist here.

The Man from Medan is a sci-fi horror short story that is based on the Ourang Medan incident that may or may not have happened in the late 1940s.  It's a pretty cool urban legend if you haven't ever heard of it.  The story is a little under one hour in length and broken up into three parts.