Hey, you can trust my "splinter personalities". They're basically just created for fun, although I will admit that Chongo Chimp serves as a very useful foil for various forms of serious political satire which poke fun at the rest of us for our all-too-human foibles and weaknesses. In that respect, he's like a character in a political cartoon in the paper. Still, he always acts as Chongo would, given the situation...and it's usually quite different from how I would behave.

As for the rest of them, they're all true to themselves. I don't consider them to be splinter personalities of me. They are creatures of the imagination, just like all the characters, say, that Conan Doyle came up with in the Sherlock Holmes tales and all the other stuff he wrote...or like the characters Walt Kelly came up with in the comic "Pogo". Most of them are fairly extreme personalities. They exist not to show a hidden side of the author, but to instead demonstrate a human extreme of some kind for its own amusing sake.

Penelope Rutledge, for example, is extremely wealthy, arrogant, quite full of herself, imbued with an extraordinary sense of entitlement and grandeur, yet she does possess the admirable qualities of idealism, courage, forthrightness, and indomitable determination, the latter being qualities any sensible human being would aspire to. As such, she is flawed, but she does have a certain charm, I think.

Shane is your bottom of the barrel, shiftless, all-Canadian local loser and irresponsible layabout and lawbreaker...yet he is shielded from facing his truly wretched condition by a childlike innocence which causes him to think he's incredibly cool and desirable. Such people do exist, and I've seen them in action. They usually end up very badly! But Shane (like Sherlock Holmes) is protected from that by virtue of the fact that he exists in a fictional story that has to go on to the next chapter. Shane is the last word in his particular archetype. Doug and Bob McKenzie really tried along that same line, but they'll never equal Shane McBrice for sheer incredible hoserhood!

And so on...

They're not fragments or splinters of me...they are archetypes of various exaggerated forms of human behaviour and personality that we see around us, each one taken to its final ridiculous extreme. That is the essence of most humour, is it not? When characters in a story go to ridiculous extremes, that's when things get funny, scary or interesting. If they don't go to some kind of extreme, it's going to be a pretty boring tale.