Some Disassembly Required, part 2

It wouldn't be my blog if I didn't have several different continuing threads running through it. We already have:

1) the epic story of Cookie and Sparky.
2) the journey from screen printer to gun maker.
3) the march towards publishing destiny.
4) several time travel episodes into the past.
5) an exploration of the ghosts that haunt me.

and now...
6) the complete dismantlement of my internet alter egos.

Like I said in part one, there are five of them. As always, these things tend to spiral out of hand once I get rolling. Just like there are at least 100 different speaking parts in the book, I couldn't limit myself to just one character. I didn't intend for that to happen, but a natural progression developed and they just showed up. Bethany ran solo for at least six months before one of her friends asked about the little sister that lived in the Vermont woods with her, and thus Brandy was born. From there, I extrapolated the rest of the family. I decided that Beth was the 2nd of five children. I've always wondered how I would have come out if we'd had an older sister, or even if Colleen had been the older one of us. I think she and I would have basically come out the same, but I might have been even more troubled than I was. She would have cast a long shadow if I were following her through school and such.

I put some of that thought into the creation of the often spoke of but never seen older sister, who I named Whitney. I also took inspiration from the older sister, Anita, in the movie Almost Famous, but took it a little further. More than just leaving a box of records, the mythology then became that Whitney built Bethany like she came out of a box of Tinker Toys, and passed down most of the things she was interested in to her younger sister. A lot of the stories told about Whitney also drew on the real life relationship between Colleen and myself, as did a lot of the stories involving Beth and Brandy, but in a different way. I also decided that there was a younger teenaged brother and a baby sister who would have been about five when all of this was created. That put the span between the siblings at a respectable 26 years. If that wasn't weird enough, the older two sisters are brunette, the third sister and the brother are blondes, and the baby sister is a redhead. I've toyed with revealing the baby sister, Shannon, to actually be Beth's daughter, which actually plays off of something in real life that I heard rumored while at FMC, but I never had the nerve to pull the trigger on that.

Bethany, basically a version of myself, was something of a geek for the same pop-culture things I'm keen for. Whitney was the rebellious, ultra cool big sister everyone wants to have. I decided Brandy would be a wild party girl, and initially I based her on Chrissy (they even have the same birthday), but the more I used her in chats and within the forum I was hanging around in, the more she developed her own famously bizarre ways of speaking. I'm not even sure where things like "It ain't no thing" or the assorted other Brandyisms came from. They just appeared. All things considered, Brandy was probably the most fun to use. Beth was by far the easiest, but Brandy had a joy of life that was pretty infectious. Bethany was always a little more sour, but being a recovering alcoholic might have had something to do with that. The challenge with Brandy was that no matter how hideous my day was or how awful things with Jude might have been at the time ... Brandy *had* to be upbeat and positive. Thank god I gave her an explosive temper later on. It came in pretty handy.

A couple of months later I got even greedier. A third character started to develop in my mind.

We'll get to her next time.