(Note to pedants: I use “girl” here in a colloquial sense, as the counterpart to “guy.” All the female character concepts mentioned below were college age or older when I stopped to think about how old the character ought to be.)

As previously stated, the basics of the feisty girl/posh guy teamup came to me while watching Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games. It was a long road from there to Wolf’s Trail.

It didn’t necessarily start there; obviously I had a fondness for both archetypes already or I wouldn’t have been interested enough to keep prodding at it (a lot of story ideas that come to me are given a “go talk to someone who cares” response.) Devotees of Julia Cameron’s approach would perhaps argue, and I’m not sure I disagree, that the French tv series was God’s way of steering me towards a particular story to tell. In any case, I brainstormed the character archetypes through a bunch of different lenses, influenced by what pop culture I was consuming at the moment. Or perhaps another way of putting it would be that it takes me a long time to discern the basic outlines of the character and dig them out of the surrounding bedrock of my cultural influences. I number them below, because I will probably have to revisit them when I write the Spear Counterpart to this post.

0. Basically Criminal Games in Fantasy Belle Epoque New Orleans, with an Anglo female reporter who was rather older and more of a responsible adult than the tv character. Origin of the “Lark and Swan” label that tags alot of these variations in my brainstorming notebooks.

1. real-world young woman, kind of a slob, getting isekai’d into a vaguely Victorian world of FASHION and FANTASY and learning how to use clothes and protocol as weapons in this strange new world. (Look, I was playing Love Nikki at the time, okay? And had recently given up Covet Fashion to boot.)

1a. modified version of same which dropped the fashion angle, and had her bouncing back and forth between worlds because the bad guys were doing the same. Closer to a traditional Chosen One. Dropped 1 and 1a due to lack of plot and lack of interest in the real-world setting.

2. Feisty widow with a gift for building magic spells meets the gigantic, imposing and very level-headed eldest brother of a family of dragon shifters. (Look, I was watching Sohryuden at the time, okay?) Dropped due to lack of plot and difficulty making sense of supporting cast.

3. Spoiled rich heiress turned reporter in a faux-French Gaslamp Fantasy/Belle Epoque setting, who gets married to a sardonic millionaire playboy type on a whim, not realizing he is actually the local Arsene Lupin analogue. Dropped because heroine was annoying, and hero’s masquerade was unsustainable.

4. Alouette Fortebat, feisty red-haired rancher’s daughter from Fantasy Argentina, who ends up in Fantasy Gaslamp France to claim her inheritance and a cursed dagger which makes her even more bloodthirsty than she already is. Unfortunately, the rest of the cursed artifacts have been sold or stolen, and she gets recruited into the local Warehouse 13 analogue (yes, guess what I was watching at the time…) to track them down. As her name implies, this was the last iteration of the Lark and Swan concept. I was uncomfortable with the “curse makes her violent” concept and uncertain of how to write that part. Also dissatisfied with the overall plot arc as it was shaping up and ambivalent with the male lead.

5. Chloe Fortebat, as you know her from Wolf’s Trail. Feisty red-haired rancher’s daughter from Fantasy Argentina who comes to Fantasy Gaslamp Hapsburg Empire to claim her inheritance and get mixed up with monsters and the people who hunt them. Bit of a loose cannon, especially if you borrow her horses without permission, but a much mellower and to me less annoying character than Alouette was shaping up to be. The previous settings for the Feisty Girl came attached to the Feisty Girl character herself; this one was more closely attached to the Posh Guy, about whom we will learn more next time.