As I have mentioned before, I wrote Book 2, The Dark and Forbidding Land after I wrote Books 3 and 5.  Therefore I had a couple of unusual problems.  On the one hand I had several characters who I wanted to use, but I couldn’t let anything (death) happen to them, because I had already used them in the later books.  I needed to kill somebody though, so I had to come up with some new characters as fodder.

Karl Harhoff is a professional hunter who comes to Birmisia.  This seems natural enough, since Birmisia is crawling with dinosaurs.  I surprised there aren’t more of them.

Courtney Jex is an artist, and as an artist type, he is just the kind of fellow that Zurfina would prefer for a companion, at least a temporary one.

Woodrow Manring is a militia officer who plays an important part in book 5.  This gave me a chance to introduce him and give him a little background.

Amoz Croffut, like Manring appears in book 5.  Having him show up here let me distinguish him a bit from Lawrence Bratihn, who is a similar though more important character.

Bainbridge Clark is a character that appears in book 1 and then gets referenced again and again in the others.  This gave me another chance to play with him.

Willy Cornish is a militiaman friend of Saba Colbshallow and Eamon Shrubb.  I liked him so much that I almost didn’t do what I was planning with him, but I did.

Shoss, Clegg, and Tassy are more lizzies.  By this time, thinking up new lizzie names started to get a little difficult, particularly since they have to have a “real” lizzie name and a diminutive version that the humans assign to them– kind of like what happened to the immigrants at Ellis Island.

Kendric (Kendrikhastu) and Kendra.  I liked the idea of the old hunter and his devoted youngsters.  I’m sorry I didn’t use them more.  The name Kendric came from a student I once had.  I had a Kendra too, but that name just came as a female version of Kendric.