Character Biography: Emmaline Fournier

Fridge repair, more post publication stuff, and plans to write today.

Daily Diary, May 17, 2023, Day 988: So Fridge repair person has come and gone, needs a replacement damper, whatever that is, and they are scheduled to come back next week to install. Glad they found something!

I've done my cleaning, 30 minute walk, Physical Therapy, more back and forth on the categories and getting Tides of Acerba listed in the Caelestis series, and got caught up on substack posts while waiting for the repair person to arrive. This afternoon I will start to write scene 3 of short story. Here are photos from my walk today.

Mary Emmaline Fournier (Emmaline):

Emmaline was born in June of 1870, which means in the upcoming story, Dandy and the Dognappers, she will have recently turned twelve, and she will be in the same eighth grade class at Clement Grammar with Jamie and Ian. Emmaline was introduced in the fifth novel in my series, Pilfered Promises, which comes right before Dandy Delivers, so she will be mentioned in that novella and Dandy’s Discovery as well.

Physical Description: From Pilfered Promises, “All in all, a remarkably handsome young girl, with clear dark blue eyes that stared solemnly out from under perfectly arched brows, a small determined chin beneath a composed mouth, and the most gorgeous hair Annie believed she’d ever seen. Pulled off the face and falling in thick ringlets to her waist, it was dark blond.”

Personality: Emmaline had been brought up in unusual circumstances. When Annie Dawson first met her, the young girl lived with her mother, a skilled dressmaker, in one of the upstairs apartments in the Silver Strike Bazaar, a fashionable department store. She had never attended school but was tutored by her mother and another woman who worked for the store. She was extremely intelligent and well-read, speaking French fluently. Living in the store meant that she was quite used to being around a good number of adults, the staff of that store, but had virtually no contact with children her own age. The result is that while she exhibits an unusual degree of self-possession and maturity, she can also appear slightly condescending and even odd to those who don’t know her history.

I created Emmaline for very specific plot purposes in Pilfered Promises, so I won’t go into more detail about her history here, for fear of offering spoilers. However, when I wrote that book, I didn’t intend to have her join the boardinghouse, or even play any future role in the series.

However, two and a half years after publishing Pilfered Promises, when I sat down to write Dandy Delivers (which in series time was only a week after the events in Pilfered Promises) the character Emmaline had changed her mind and decided she was going to move in with the Misses Moffets, the elderly dressmakers who lived up in the boardinghouse attic.

Characters really do have a mind of their own.

Subsequently, Emmaline has shown up with Jamie and Ian in other stories, and, like the two boys, plays a major role in the short story, Dandy’s Discovery (which is only $1.99 as both an ebook and audiobook.)