Afterword and Acknowledgements

Strum-dum, Strum-da-da Dum!

Acknowledgments and Afterword

I’d like to thank several people for assistance in this book. First, my proofreaders, Bozo, Greg, Ryan, and Steve. You find the strange little mistakes that I couldn’t see, and gave me confidence when you couldn’t find mistakes.

To Lexi, Annie’s sister, for your story of confidence and vulnerability.

To SpacerX, for unabashed assistance and advice.

To Michael Wex, author of the book “Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion (When English Just Won’t Do)”. If it were not for you and this fabulous resource, Annie would not have been possible, or at least as much fun.

To “Raccoon”, my SCI reader, and the one guy who knows why Sandy has a picture of a raccoon on her underwear, for your feedback and help in understanding assisted living.

To all of my readers, especially those who wrote to me. Whether you are telling me how much you are enjoying the story or just flirting with Annie or Sandy, your feedback is what gives me the enthusiasm to write.

And last, and most, to my lovely wife, who is my first audience, and gets to hear every chapter as it is meant to be read, out-loud. Thank you for understanding and supporting this need to write, for laughing and crying at the right places, for letting me know when things fall flat or get confusing, for convincing me to not use the N-word even in that one context, and for dealing with me getting up at 3 AM every morning to write.

I know that most stories here on SOL don’t have an afterword, but I’m that type of person who likes to share the HOW as much as the WHAT of what I make. I’d like to share a few thoughts with you. Maybe it’ll inspire you in your writing. Or maybe it’ll keep you casually entertained as you read this instead of doing whatever it is that you should be doing right now.

CHARACTER ORIGINS
Joey is paradoxically one of the oldest characters in this story, because I first conceived of him about 15 to 20 years ago. I come from a strong background of comic book collecting and superhero role-playing games, so I still have large portions of my brain devoted to super-power analysis and character creation. Joey came about from a brainstorming session when I was looking at the Champions RPG rules and mentally combining several different powers and advantages, and I combined “Variable Power Pool” with the “Usable on others” advantage, and saw the possibilities. I then wondered what he would be like if he couldn’t use the powers himself, but had to rely on others to use the powers, and I quickly decided he didn’t make a good RPG character that I would want to play. But I was intrigued by the character, and kept him around in the back of my mind for years.

During my idle wondering about the effectiveness of Joey as an RPG character, I also worked out his basic origin story. I came up with the Omega Man/Omega Boy storyline, where his father was killed and he was left in the streets for years, living homeless, and I realized he would only come out of hiding when he was discovered by a reporter. So every time I started thinking about Joey, I always came to the conclusion that this was really the reporter’s story, not Joey’s. When I revisited this storyline when searching for erotic story material, I saw the romantic and erotic potential, and decided it was time to tell her story.

What can I say about Tricia? She was tailored to fit the story. When I started this project, I knew very little about her. I didn’t have any idea of what she was like. I started working out the things that she had to do and show at the beginning of the story, and then the end of the story, and that’s how I came to learn about Tricia. Her journey had to include sexuality, love, sacrifice, and growing up. This led to the story of a party-girl who searches for respect, and faces and accepts responsibility.

Making her Hispanic was my dig at the plethora of television dramas which all seem to center on the trials and tribulations of beautiful, rich, white people. I refuse to watch them. I cast about for an appropriate ethnicity that matched the fiery-tempered party-girl image, and I went with Hispanic. (I also went with that because I knew some Spanish from high school.) Tricia needed to be hot, passionate, spicy, and sexy, and Hispanic just appealed to me.

Making her Brazilian was just one step more of that thinking. I know that she could be anything; Mexican, Puerto Rican, Columbian, Panamanian, Dominican, etc..., but I just gravitated to Brazilian. I don’t always put a lot of thought into these details; I usually grab the first idea that jumps into my head and stick with it.

Now I am man enough to admit when I make mistakes, and I made a mistake making her a Spanish speaking Brazilian. Brazilians mostly speak Portuguese. But by the time I discovered this it was firmly entrenched in my mind that she was Brazilian and spoke Spanish, so I did a little fudging and made her half-Brazilian and half-Mexican. Her father was Brazilian and her mother Mexican. She grew up in Arizona, a legal American, in a Spanish-speaking community, and has more experience and use for Spanish than Portuguese. I also decided that she doesn’t often tell people that she is part Mexican because when she is telling someone her ethnicity, it is usually in the context of seducing a man, and Brazilian just seems to most men she meets just that more exotic than Mexican. It helps her in her seductions.

Coming up with Tricia’s looks was a challenge. The hard part for me was to find a picture of a woman who actually inspired the character. When I write, I often put a picture of a woman on the screen next to the word processor just to help channel the character, and for Tricia that woman turned out to be Sheyla Almeda Hershey. I was thrilled when I discovered her, for there was something about her face and smile and hair and body that just screamed Tricia to me. But the very next day after I discovered her, she made headlines for getting the worlds largest breast implants. I was actually devastated; I thought she was already perfect. What was she doing pumping more silicone into herself for?

Tricia needed to find Joey, and she needed to use an age-modifying graphics program to identify him. And it just struck me as highly unlikely that Tricia, trained as a reporter, would know how to use one of these programs. She needed someone with some specific technical skills, and so I created a geek friend.

(Ah, Annie ... Let me be up front and clear about her. She is fictional. I’m sorry to say this, but she is not based on any real person that I know. So, you have no chance with her.)

Since this story was intended to get erotic, I made the geek friend a beautiful and buxom woman for Joey to eventually enjoy. And because the story was now heading into romantic triangle territory, I had to put her in the same house, making her Tricia’s roommate.

Since I was still on this “no white chicks” kick, I cast about for another nationality. She had to contrast with Tricia visually, ethnically, and in energy. So I went with Japanese. Annie would have a delicate, demure, and quiet beauty that would contrast nicely against Tricia’s overt and fiery sexuality.

At this point I was seeing her as a sidekick, and I needed to spice her up somehow. The technical side of her told me she was smart, and in comic books there is a tradition of brainy characters to be wheelchair-bound, so I got the idea to make her handicapped.

This of course spurred a huge argument in my brain concerning the pros and cons of a handicapped character. I realized that if I was going to do this, I wanted to do it right, and do something different. Now I was a big fan of the X-Men, but it occurred to me that I had never seen Professor Xavier ever go to the bathroom. Or get dressed. Or take a bath. Or do one of a hundred other things that we temporarily able-bodied people do without thinking too much about. And as I did research and read some blogs written by the wheelchair-bound, I saw one fiery post from this one girl who wrote something along the lines of “Yeah, I wear nappies (diapers). What do you want to make of it?” And when I saw that, I realized that was what I wanted in Annie.

How she became Jewish on the other hand, I have no freaking idea. It simply popped into my head one day, and it made me laugh, and ever since then she has been Jewish. It’s probably one of the best ideas I have ever had, and not a day goes by that she doesn’t brighten my day by spouting something Yiddish in my ear at the right moment.

The girl I found to “play” Annie, the one who’s picture I put up when writing her, is Hitomi Tanaka, a Japanese porn star. She is gorgeous, but I have to tell you, every time I look at her now, I think to myself “Yeah, she looks Jewish.”