The Big Renege?

I’m suddenly unsure about what I’m doing this April. I know I have to get moving again on the novel  I call Crazy Legs (working title). I was also about to take on the poem-a-day idea which I sort of view as a pact between the Ponderer and I.

But…

Today’s Evensies event was very well attended. Normally outside of November NaNo we usually get a couple or few participants on any given Sunday. Today we had around ten.

We used to meet every other Sunday outside of November; every even-numbered Sunday date, hence the name Evensies. When a core of us grew fonder and started meeting every single week we pondered a name change. It was The Liaison who said in essence: Hey, might it be cool if we just kept calling it Evensies? Even the odd ones! And not even explain why!

Yes of course it would, And so we did. And thank god because few things are so ghastly to me as a group who dares call themselves a writers group who collectively betray no imagination or sense of mystery.

Today’s Evensies was well attended because it was not so much a write-in as a call to arms. The Liaison himself has fallen. His battle with cancer ceased a few days back when his treatment strategy was dialled back with the goal to just keep him comfortable. Yesterday he died. His name was Chris Kelworth. His writing is here and there on the internet.

Today we shared a lot of tears and hugs. Shy writers who probably have social fears and disorders, I’m guessing: even they threw there arms around myself and others.

Chris passed on the eve of little April Camp NaNo. It was the eve of the main event; November NaNo when he fell sick in the first place. The irony is cruel. These events meant the world to him. Though I would like to think that the internet publishing success he was beginning to make a habit of meant a lot more!

In November he returned from brain surgery and still made his 50,000 word count which seems miraculous and yet I think we all knew he would. And now we’ve decided that this April we must honour him by tackling our own most ambitious word counts and following through. I am inclined toward this but it may mean I will have to let the poem-a-day endeavor slide.

About twelve years ago I came out to my first NaNo write-in and the Liaison was there; as quiet as a mouse; riddled with anxiety himself. He sat beside a priest who seemed the unofficial leader at the time and he would only talk to her. If someone would have told me that this priest would become a tremendous friend of mine; who would confide in me things she trusted to no other person, that I would move into her home and finally watch her perish from her own cancer and that this mousy little fellow would take over as our leader and a strong one at that … I would have said impossible and impossible!

People can be so different than what they appear or what we imagine. They never fit in the little box we design for them.