There may be art problems, delaying Zephyr a little bit more, so I will just do a very short post this week.

Jac' sort of come out the easiest of the characters, and to the certain extent that ease makes me very concerned about concentrating the story on her, and ignoring the other two characters. I don't want it to be just about her, but since she gets to have all the visually interesting action stuff, I have to be cautious when writing her.

Since I knew I had a female action lead, I decided to complete the subversion of the action hero archetype by giving her an action hero style name/nickname. Jack is fairly common, and Jac can be short for Jacqueline. The other female lead was going to specialize in social interaction, so I thought of making her old school American, Mayflower family type. If the male lead was going to be in the mental sphere, it would work best if he is the immigrant, or near immigrant. Flexbility of mind coming from flexible sense of self.

That left Jac as falling somewhere in the middle, not newly immigriant, but not as respected as the female lead. Jacqueline made me think French, then Quebecois. I did flirt with maybe Cajun or Acadian as having her being one of the American French fit nicely into the English/French competition on the American frontier. There was the Patriotes Rebellion in 1837 in Quebec against the English, so she may have left Quebec in that time frame. Since we were mucking around the history, the Patriotes Rebellion did not have to happen exactly when it did our history, but probably sometime closeby. That places the timeframe of the main Zephyr Dray story in the late 1830s, 1840s. Which works, because that gives time for most of the aborted attempts to create steam vehicles from the 1810-1820 time to succeed and mature, but is not so late it bumps up against the tech revolution of the late 1840s-1850, with the rise of the railroads.

And the circumstance of her leaving Quebec would tie into her relationship with Colin, Nellie and especially Colin's father Malcolm.