This is where we meet Annie’s brother Bob, who is the main driving force keeping her in Emery.
Bob is, part and parcel, my former brother-in-law Timmy, sadly passed some years now. An unending source of… well, so many things, Timmy had an endless enthusiasm for whatever dangled before his attention at the moment. An intensely social creature, he would engage anyone available. He was assessed as an having the intelligence of a five year old, and the sociability of a twelve year old. Now *that* makes for an interesting mix. But my experiences with Timmy made Bob Dale incredibly easy to write; I would have no clue how to write that five-twelve mix, but I didn’t need to. I just had to plop Timmy down, in my imagination, into any of SoTC’s situations, and Bob Dale wrote himself.
Timmy was, as Bob is, carefree about somethings and doggedly obsessed about others. In real life, that caused a fair amount of stresses from time to time. That was one thing I didn’t want to draw forward into Bob. Annie’s caretaking responsibilities, self-imposed, were all I wanted to go into.
As I have said before, every character I write is at least a little bit me. The circumstances in which Annie finds herself trapped are, however, made up out of whole cloth. I’ve never been trapped the way Annie was, or the way she insisted she be. Oh, everybody winds up enmeshed in various sorts of traps or bogs. But I never got entangled in a life situation the way Annie did. I’ve gotta say, I’ve had things pretty good. Last note: Timmy was *not* a fan of old horror films. That’s the part of me that’s tucked into Bob Dale.