the void

I don't know how many of you go back with me to comicsfic and Outside the Lines, or go back to mailing-list-era comicsfic at all, but if you do in any capacity, then you knew Alicia McKenzie, the Grande Dame of everything to do with Cable. I met her in the mid-late 1990s when I sent her an email out of the blue asking if she could look at the first couple of chapters of my Cable-heavy story, and she was gracious enough to not only respond but also encourage and beta-read what turned out to be a 170k word epic. Over the subsequent twenty-five years we were co-authors and beta readers and universe-builders and most importantly friends and that lasted long after she faded from active fandom. We went from pondering what to do with certain characters in her Pantheon universe to pondering about jobs and life trajectories and never quite finishing our Ph.Ds and colonoscopies and plague. She'd found a passion in teaching and was brilliant at it, as she was in almost everything she did. She passed away this past weekend at the tender age of 46 and I am heartbroken. She was my first fandom friend and one of my most long-standing friends of any variety and she modeled generosity and compassion on a level I will never be able to match. She was a very proud Canadian, a lover of good cheese, and a worrywart and I adored her.