No, really. I know you think I’m making this up. But I’m not, I swear. Chevenga emailed me for the first time Aug. 17, and we’ve gone back and forth a few times since.
Umm…. I guess I’d better explain this properly.
Years ago… well, I recounted it well enough in a footnote to a February 2008 post on my artblog, here. I quote (with edits):
About the domain name: years ago, having some other idea for how to get my doughty character an Internet presence, I checked the availability of “www.chevenga.com” and found that it was owned by someone else.
Italian, I wondered? The only Google mentions I’ve found of the word other than references to or riffs off my books are in Italian; che venga means “that it comes” in that language, something that I did not know when I named the character.
Or perhaps it was being used as an acronym by an organization such as the Coalition of Holistic Equal Value Enhanced National Giraffe Associations (CHEVENGA)?
Or maybe some enterprising person, not quick enough off the mark to have registered “www.coke.com” or “www.ibm.com” so that he could make millions selling them to their rightful owners, was looking to do the same with a more obscure brand for more modest gain, and would at some point contact me with an offer?
I went on Whois, which informed me that www.chevenga.com was owned by a person named Jeyen Chevenga Barham-Kaiel.
A fan who was using the name as an Internet handle, after reading my books? Someone who thought of it independently? I’ll probably never know. When I checked again after deciding to start writing online, he’d given chevenga.com up, so I grabbed it. If you’re out there, Jeyen Chevenga, thanks for giving the domain name back. And I promise: there is a giraffe association near you.
So imagine my feelings when the name Jeyen Chevenga Barham-Kaiel showed up in my inbox on August 17. He’d been googling his own name, and thus found the above somewhat-snippy snippet in my artblog. He is a technical writer in the Seattle area and a fan of sff and anime. He blogs on a wide range of topics—lushly-drawn monsters, charges on plastic grocery bags, zombie attacks, delightfully-human weirdness and how to do better on a peripheral-vision test by playing video games beforehand, just to name a few recent posts—with emphasis on the fannish and the eccentric. His writing is error-free to a degree that puts me to shame, even in emails. To me he wrote:
I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t remember if I ever contacted you before to let you know that I was very inspired by Fourth Chevenga, so much so that I adopted the name. I hope that you don’t mind about there being a real-world Chevenga (and sometimes Shefenkas and Karas Raikas and Shininao...). A thousand thanks for sharing those characters. I try to live up to Chevenga in both name and spirit.
Now when he says he adopted the name, he means it. It’s legally changed, on his Social Security card and everything. Chevenga has a Social Security card. (Now he’s going to live long enough to need one.) Don’t believe me?
Do I mind about there being a real-world Chevenga? Well… the feelings are, I admit, a bit mixed. I am honoured beyond honoured, of course. You get a sort of drunk, heady feeling from finding out that your work meant that much to a fan. I asked him, because I was curious, just how does he try to live up to the name? He answered:
Mostly, I love his big heart, “lion-heart” in the best brave and loyal symbolic sense. His willingness to see through other people’s eyes. Being fiercely democratic, but also expecting everyone to speak their vote. Being aware of the costs of leadership. Now that I try to write it down, I suppose I try to be as much Yeoli as Chevenga.
If everyone exercised more of these traits, the world would be a better place, so I can’t feel anything but good about it.
But there’s another part of me, just an itty-bitty sliver of me, which… well, let’s put it this way. All writers who garner really avid fans should avoid reading Misery by Stephen King.
At the same time, JCBK has never been anything but polite, so I regretted being snide on the artblog, though he said in a subsequent email he hadn’t noticed.
At least if he is excessively honouring me, I have company. Two others of his names are drawn from other sff works: Jeyen from Sharon Green’s “Jalav” books and Kaiel from Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury. When I kvetched to him in an email that people tend to read Chevenga “Shevenga,” as in Chevrolet, he bellyached back that he gets exactly the same, plus frequent mispronunciations of Jeyen (properly pronounced same as the letters J.N.) and Kaiel (which is pronounced like Kyle but with more of a second syllable.) When I do a pronunciation guide for the splash site, I may well engage his assistance.
I asked him in a further email, if Jeyen is his first name, shouldn’t I start my emails to him “Hi Jeyen”? No, he told me; Chevenga is more personal, so he prefers “Hi Chevenga” or, if I want to be more informal, “Hi Cheng.” So that’s how I’m addressing him. I can’t say how weird it feels to type it.
An extreme example, I guess, of the truth that if you put something out there, you cease to own it exclusively. Lois McMaster Bujold once said, “You don’t write a book; you induce one.” Readers will make it their own, in ways as multifarious as the readers themselves, sometimes just in their imaginations, and other times in ways that manifest in the real world.
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