1. Have a conception. When you are going to create a VP, think what you are going to do with it. Do you have any ideas or moods that are different from what you have demonstrated before? It is rather silly to make VP only to express through it your habitual thought – you can well do this under your usual name.

2. The name is essential. It is said that the appetite comes with eating. This is not true. The appetite comes when you see a sign of restaurant. Look at these names: “Aleksander Sergeyevich”, “The Widow”, “Lunokhod 2”. Do you feel that the name determine... practically everything? It is unlikely that an article signed by “Andrej Sokolov” would be read by people at all. Therefore, relax and ponder upon what name should be given to your VP. After the name is chosen, all the rest (from the wish of saying foul to hard mental disorders) will follow automatically.

3. Create the unique thing. Try to make your VP dissimilar to others. It is essentially this what determine to what extent your VP is a Personality. Every new VP should deny or supplement the principles that were used to create preceding VPs (or even preceding generations of VPs). Use the inversion method: locate some universal principle and realize its antithesis.

The stereotype (the old principle): VP is created by one person who is its only master over all its life.

The inversion: VP is created and governed by a group of people or the control over it passes every time to a new master.

4. Don’t invent one too many. All great VPs have been created before you. Look at the examples in literature, especially in English and American literature of 18^th and 19^th centuries. The two main archetypes were described in one of the short stories by Edgar Poe: a fatal woman whose face has never seen by anybody and a man who is a noble robber and who cannot be caught. There are other classical types. Chose one of such archetypes and develop it. Make it evident that it is a living and acting person rather than mere literary character.

5. Remember Stanislavski. Identify yourself with your VP and use its language. Never think like this: ‘I will say that and sign as the Hound of the Baskervilles’. Think like this: ‘What the Hound of the Baskervilles would say, if it were in my position?’ Take into account everything: the language of the social class to which your character belongs, his religion and his maladies, his tastes and style. Consider these limitations as the walls within which you should to settle down and don’t worry about the door.

6. Don’t get overheated. If you get easily into the role of your VP and freely abandon it, never get confused and sometimes even don’t remember what you were doing in the role of VP, our congratulations: you have schizophrenia! We recommend choosing clinics in the places with mild climate: Bakchisarai, Baden-Baden, or Borneo.

7. The power is in the details. Remember that ketchup is a more dreadful drug than heroin: if heroin was suddenly disappeared from Moscow, only a few thousand of drug addict will suffer, but it the ketchup was disappeared... imagine what will happen! Therefore, don’t try to be extravagant – all what is genial is simple. Learn to supply your VP with fine, natural details used as if in passing. Describe as if accidentally the building of the University of Tartu, use a few special words characteristic for some area and you can link your VP (and those who observe it) to the places where you have never been. In the same way the linkage to a profession, age and so forth can be made.

8. Your deeds are your evidence. Don’t try to prove the reality of your VP by any “documentary evidence”. In the age of high technologies, nobody can be sold by the “honestly scanned passport” or “unique electronic signature/address”. However, if your VP creates regularly something impressive – not even necessarily very talented – the observers will have no doubts its existence.

9. Don’t kick against the pricks. It is said that every criminal go back to the place where he has committed the crime. The creator of VP often feels temptation to expose himself: to debate with its own VP or to rejoice its achievement with everybody else. Keep this desire in – don’t show yourself when it is not necessary. Don’t let also to be involved in long discussions with a number of people at the same time or in complex relationships when you become bounded by promises. Sometimes the silence of man, its unexpected disappearance is more of benefit because it provides a sense of mystery.

10. Prevent unmasking. Attempts to unmask your VP will begin some time or other, therefore, it is better to take this process under your control from the very beginning. “Unmask” your VP yourselves – predict the time of the possible attack and do it ahead of others, soften the attack and warding it off your VP. The more subtle method is to create a Virtual Unmasker along with the creation of VP. If even of these VP is disclosed, the other will remain with you and it will have the alibi of the winner. It is also possible to use more complicated methods of withdrawal (see paragraph 3 about the assignation to another master).

11. Have you failed? – Don’t worry. Consider this a rehearsal, a draft. Analyse your mistakes and go on further, to a more perfect VP. Your ideal is Virtual Personality that will live through the ages even when your mortal body that has devoted to it all its time and energy is decayed in the grave.

12. Look round in time. The weak real personality will never create a strong virtual one (the reverse is not true). If you succeeded in creation of a strong VP, you possibly have to try yourself in the other creative environment as well, such as skydiving, wild hive beekeeping, or work as a kindergartener.

13. Never use all these pieces of advice at once. Chose a few of them – for example, only even or odd ones. Alternatively, simply chose from five to seven pieces of advice at random. As a random number generator, the wristwatch can be used.