Memories of What Never Was Chapters 21 and 22

So, there I was, a week ago, ready to put some finishing touches on these two chapters before I uploaded them to my site, aaaaaaaand hardrive failure.  Hurray for that.  That'll teach me not to backup my work each time I'm finished for the day.  So yeah, I lost both chapters completely and had to completely rewrite them from scratch and memory after I got my computer fixed and back up and running again.  And if you care to read them you can find them at the bottom of this page.

Here we have what I like to think of as a pretty good introduction to what the Lost South is actually like.  Some more of Brand's antics.  Kriss slowly becoming a bit more emotional.  And Temari's introduction.  And for like the third time, I've completely changed her personality again.  I figured that the personality I was using in the previous draft of this version didn't really fit with her backstory, and the way of speaking I had her using was really hard for me to keep consistent, so I decided to change them both to be a little more appropriate and easier for me to write.  Curse you logic, always getting in the way!!!  It's kind of one of the unwritten rules of storytelling that you don't introduce new characters beyond the halfway point of the story, that's why I introduced Jonathan when I did, and gave Baindred a few lines in the beginning, even if the only actual appearance he made was at a distance so that he couldn't really be made out, but here I am introducing Temari with only a third of the book left.  But the thing you have to take into account is that a.) I introduced the idea of her long before now b.) finding her has been the driving force for a good chunk of the story, and c.) the story doesn't end at the end of this book.  There's still two more volumes that come after it.  So I figure I'm not breaking the rule too badly. 

About 2/3 of the way done with the first draft of this book now, and I'm doing a lot of planning out how, exactly, the big battle at the end is going to play out.  It's a lot harder than you might think it would be.  There are a lot of elements that need to be considered, like how the larger picture of the battle as a whole progresses, and how the smaller story of the characters fits into it, to name the most obvious.  I'm sure the first draft of it will be terrible, but that's the beauty of first drafts, you can always go back and fix them as many times as you need to, or even toss them out completely and start over from scratch.