Ethan Bellamy
Introduction
A thread on VAMB - The Voyagerangel Message Board - on the pairing of Janeway with an original character was what started the germ of the idea for this story. I have never paired Janeway before with an original character and thought it might be a good way of exploring someone uniquely created that did not necessarily ascribe to an already pre-set characterisation such as some crew and the officers of Voyager.
As it always happens when my muse hits me, there was an instant image of a man - his appearance strangely enough inspired by a gentleman who trains for dancesport with his wife as partner under the same person who trains my daughter ballroom. With this man's picture in my head all the time, the rest of Ethan's body soon appeared. I made his hair white [something that could change later as I saw fit for the development of the storyline] and his eyes green, a tribute to a former very good friend of mine. Then, I had to decide whether to put him in uniform, which I did, and also, to give the character a little more dimension - so I made him a writer who happens to play the cello very well. I have already expounded on why I chose the cello as instrument for Ethan Bellamy to play. Also, it was then easy to make Ethan hate Starfleet and the Federation to increase the air of mystique that surrounded him.
I had in mind so many things that the first few chapters were constantly being revised. I made the setting the state of Oregon and gave Ethan a mountain cabin called Beaver's Lodge, after the state animal of Oregon. I wanted him to indulge in outdoor activities since he lived mostly in his cabin, so I studied the geographical features of Curry County - to the south coast of Oregon, where there are high cliffs with mountain ranges forming the stunning backdrop of the Pacific Northwest.
When I decided to give Ethan some angst, even deep angst, I thought that since I've decided to make him a (former) Starfleet officer, I'd have something happen to him "ten, eleven years ago", and looking at the Trek timeline, found that the event that best fitted that statement was the Battle of Wolf 359. Got some great insight through my research on that battle. Since the Borg formed the backbone of that confrontation, I thought of making Ethan Borg, or former Borg, or something that could revisit him in the years to follow. And so Ethan the Borg was born.
To make him even more mysterious in the first half of the novel, I thought that I'd hide his identity as a writer of a few famous novels, and so Henry F. Marchand came into being. So Ethan Bellamy was born.
I felt I had taken a chance on this kind of pairing as so many readers are avid and die-hard J/Cers and I was in turmoil as to whether the story would have a readership. It was really heartening to see readers on their part taking a chance and reading "Ethan Bellamy" or "EB"! as it came to be known.
Ethan Bellamy took approximately eight months to write. During that time I had suffered some trauma through bereavement, been myself in grave angst over many aspects of the story. There were times I felt like giving up on it, then thought that it wouldn't do at all. I vowed to finish it and leave the story out there, another contentious issue arising from recent happenings in which such hypothesis had been put to me.
Unlike Ethan, I wanted to share what I had written, no matter how much I've invested emotionally in the story. When the time came to write "The End" I felt exhausted, drained, on the downward ride of the rollercoaster I'd been on for so long. I was sad, very sad to part finally from a character who had, it seemed, become almost real to me. For a long time he had been real. I suddenly picked out men in a crowd whom I imagined should look like Ethan!
This story has spawned fanart from readers who were inspired by the story, or particular chapters. It spawned poetry from readers who were inspired. It also inspired readers to find pictures of men whom they thought could be Ethan look-alikes and so I've viewed pictures of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the actor David Strathairn, who actually best fitted Ethan. I'm not sure whether this has happened for other fanfics but it's certainly the first of my own stories to have generated this kind of interest.
So I thank all my readers who participated, who had some connection with the story, who enjoyed reading Ethan Bellamy.
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vanhunks
March 2006