I was re binging all the Leda House stories, and I read the bits with Jonah for the first time! Given that he makes such the miraculous return in the flood verse, how bout a time in which he gets to live? Maybe saved by jim or eddy from the knife?
A rough year leads into a golden summer reunion and Brian figures his way to the next stage of his life.
Excerpt:
And then it was him and the phone and his whole stupid adolescence weighing down on him so he almost couldn’t breathe. They’d ask him about his life here and he’d have to say ‘you know, sort of boring. I go to classes. I do okay. Not great. Turns out there’s lots of brains in the world and some of them are smarter than me. I don’t know what I want to do. I’m afraid of failing. Haven’t dated, haven’t gotten high, haven’t drunk, haven’t made real friends. Sort of sad. Sort of tired. Sort of nothing, but 100% quiz grades. You know. Exactly the fucking same.”
They’d probably just nod. Hadn’t expected more of him. He took the worn card from his wallet. At least if he went then he’d have a story to tell. He could always say he found it by accident.
Rules: give us the links to your fics with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fic with the least words (feel free to interpret however you would like; if not on AO3, can be on tumblr or FFN!).
“In Jewish thought, a sin is not an offense against God, an act of disobedience. A sin is a missed opportunity to act humanly. The verb to sin in Hebrew is also used in the sense of ‘missing the target.’ When God created us free to choose between good and bad, He also gave us the capacity to know when we had chosen wrongly”
— Harold Kushner, To Life!: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking
The point in Judaism isn’t to transcend our humanity through some sort of “salvation.”
It’s to fulfill it.
buddhism does something like this too - it doesn’t have “rules”, it has “training precepts” to train you to become an habitually more decent person, and the language used isn’t remotely to do with “sinning”, it translates as skilful or unskillful behaviour, because the idea is to become skilled at being a decent person
My fave thing to tell folks who are a lil flabbergasted that there’s no Jewish concept of hell is that the goal for humans in Judaism is to become complete
fanfiction is dangerous. reading a good fanfic can like COMPLETELY change my opinion of a character
WRITING fanfic – even something I mean to be completely meaningless, emotionally irrelevant crack – can turn me *feral* for characters I literally hated before I opened Libre.
So I do my best to write the weird shit all the time. :)
I think maybe instead of ‘attention’, a word that should be neutral but isn’t, maybe what we could use is 'validation’. An affirmation that the labor is worth the time and effort, isn’t an irrational thing to want.
It doesn’t need to be hundreds of comments, but I can tell you the magic of a single interaction is fuel in the tank when I’m running low on get-up-and-go to write.
