March is Women’s History Month, so this week’s Throwback Thursday blog will focus on five of my favorite original female characters. Love them or hate them, OFCs have always been a big part of Backstreet Boys fan fiction. As BSB fangirls, we may not have been able to fulfill our teenage fantasy of hooking up with our favorite Backstreet Boy for real, but we could write a fanfic about it! Those of us who continued to write past our teenybopper years and into adulthood saw our female protagonists evolve from thinly-disguised self-inserts and Mary Sues to more mature, multifaceted characters, who may or may not have hooked up with a Backstreet Boy. Not all of them did!
Case in point…
5. Sam Torres
When the character Sam first appeared as Kevin’s hired caregiver in My Brother’s Keeper, some readers may have assumed that she would eventually become his love interest. To quash that notion, I made her a lesbian instead. The real reason I wanted Kevin to have a female caregiver was to give their relationship a different feel from the one he had with Nick and AJ, who were also acting as caregivers. Since Kevin was recently widowed, I never considered making his relationship with Sam anything more than platonic. I’ve always appreciated friendships between men and women, which appear in many of my stories. In fact, most of the characters on this list started out in platonic relationships, although some of them later progressed to romantic ones. Sam was never meant to be a main character, though. Her role was a relatively minor one, but I really enjoyed writing her. Spunky and cheerful, she became the ray of sunshine Kevin needed during a very dark time in his life. Her colorful appearance reflected her personality, from her bright blue hair and red glasses to her rainbow tie-dye scrubs and yellow Crocs. But Sam wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Like Kevin, she knew how it felt to have the dark cloud of grief hanging over her head, having lost her older brother a few years before she started working for Kevin to help pay her way through medical school – and pay it forward by caring for someone with a similar injury as her brother, Ray. I love a tragic backstory, but I also love that Sam didn’t let hers define her. Instead, it inspired her to become a neurosurgeon, so that she could help others like Ray and Kevin. The world could certainly use more people like Sam.
4. Jori Wilder
Like Sam, Jori from Secrets of the Heart was a colorful character, although the dark cloud hanging over her head weighed much more heavily on her. She technically didn’t hook up with a Backstreet Boy either, but only because the Backstreet Boys didn’t exist in the alternate universe in which her story takes place. She did hook up and have a baby with AJ. While most of the characters on this list are completely original creations, Jori was based on a real person: my sister. As far as I know, my sister is unaware that I ever based a character on her, and if she ever read Secrets, she probably wouldn’t be too happy with the way I portrayed her. I took some of her attributes and personality traits and exaggerated them to make Jori a much more extreme version of her, but they do share certain similarities, from their looks to their love of the Beatles. My sister also struggled with mental illness when she was younger and developed postpartum depression after the birth of both of her children, although, thankfully, not to the extent that Jori did. She is a much better mother than her fictional counterpart. Jori is the most flawed character on this list by far, but that’s exactly why she made my top five. Her flaws added to her complexity and made her a fun character for me to write. I found it both therapeutic and challenging to get inside her head and write her in a sympathetic way, especially as the story progressed. While I knew she would become less likeable and more problematic, I still wanted her to be relatable to readers in some respect. Hopefully, I achieved that goal.
3. Dawn Leeuwenhoek
The newest character on this list, Dawn from The World Will Be Waiting is also my current favorite character to write. She’s one of two original female characters I created for TWWBW. The other one, Natalie, is the type of woman men want to date and women want to be. But, to me, Dawn is the type of woman that anyone would want to be friends with. She’s kind, easy to talk to, and quick-witted, with a sarcastic, self-deprecating sense of humor. She’s physically strong, mentally tough, and generally resilient, having overcome two of the hardest challenges a woman could face: a divorce from her unfaithful husband and the death of her terminally ill son. Some people would struggle to find the will to go on living in the face of such devastating losses, but Dawn, a former athlete, picked herself up, dusted herself off, and stayed in the game. She played to her strengths as an experienced caregiver and funneled the love she had left in her heart into another family, who was dealing with a tragic loss of their own. In turn, Kevin and Mason came to love and depend on her, too. I’ve really enjoyed writing the lovely “found family” dynamic that exists between this little trio, the maternal role Dawn plays in Mason’s life and the platonic co-parenting relationship she shares with Kevin. It’s unconventional, but it works for all of them.
2. Claire Ryan
I’ve always loved platonic relationships among characters who support and care for each other. Nobody embodies that better than Claire from Broken and By My Side. While her relationship with Nick did eventually turn romantic, she started out as a casual acquaintance who became his close friend and confidant before she reached soulmate status. Claire was more of a “guy’s girl” than a girly girl. She was an outgoing, easygoing tomboy who preferred comfy clothes to pretty dresses, loved pizza and beer, listened to rock music, and enjoyed raunchy jokes and toilet humor. Like the other characters on this list, she faced her share of hardship, having been diagnosed with leukemia at the age of twenty. This made her more empathetic toward Nick as they bonded over their shared experience of battling cancer. Despite her own health challenges, Claire was always willing to lend a helping hand, a listening ear, and a shoulder to lean and/or cry on, and would drop everything to be there for the people she loved. She was no Pollyanna, but her sunny disposition and sense of humor certainly brightened Nick’s darkest days.
1. Cary Hilst
Dawn and Claire are the kind of characters I’d want to be friends with, but Cary from Curtain Call was the kind of character I’d want to be. Sweet, pretty, talented, compassionate, and just a little bit quirky, she had many of the qualities I admire in other women. I based her appearance and style on one of my longtime celebrity girl-crushes, Zooey Deschanel. Cary needed to be a reasonably-talented singer for the premise of Curtain Call to work, but I didn’t want her to be a typical pop princess, so I gave her a ukulele and a love of oldies music. I also gave her a pet teacup pig named Hambelina, who wins the award for my all-time favorite animal character, hands-down. While she dreamed of making it as a musician, Cary kept her day job in medicine and made her living as a nurse practitioner, which made her a perfect candidate for the position Nick recruited her to fill. Like most of the other characters on this list, Cary played a nurturing role, providing most of the comfort in the “hurt/comfort” scenes she shared with Nick throughout the novel. She was the Charlotte to his Wilbur, sacrificing some of her own personal life in a desperate attempt to improve, if not save, his. While I would say that Cary’s biggest personality flaw was a tendency to be too submissive and allow others to take advantage of her, I admire her unwavering loyalty and devotion to Nick. Against her better judgment, she let him live out his dying wish, subjecting herself to the heartbreak of losing him in order to make him happy. But as much as I loved writing Cary and the unique relationship she had with Nick, I sure wouldn’t want to be in her shoes – no matter how cute they were!
I guess that just goes to show that my fanfics have never been about fulfilling my own personal fantasies, as I tend to write more about my worst fears than my wildest dreams. While I love these five female characters, I’m very glad their stories are just fiction!