Personal Note: Jubilatio Admiratioque

The results of this year's Green Lion are in at last. I am both humbled and exalted (boggle! whoop! yippee!) to learn that my entry, "Ubi Sunt Gaudia?", won both the juried portion of the contest and the short-form portion of the Readers' Poll. I'll be posting it here soon ... once I correct the typo and the grammatical error and the three or four idiot mistakes that jumped out at me five minutes after I entered it in the contest.

Congratulations to all my fellow winners and kudos to everyone who entered! To be honored amid the praiseworthy is honor indeed ...

Fanfic: Ubi Sunt Gaudia? (Fullmetal Alchemist)

Title: Ubi Sunt Gaudia?
Fandom: FMA (anime version)
Character(s): Ed, Alfons Heiderich
Pairing(s): None (sorry, Ed/Hei fans!)
Rating: PG-13 (for language and anti-religious diatribe)
Word Count: ~6500
Warnings: End-of-series spoilers.
A/N: My entry for the Green Lion 2006, sponsored by the Scimitar Smile archive; I'm pleased and not a little overwhelmed to report it won both Best Overall 'Fic from the judges and Best Short 'Fic in the Readers' Choice poll. That said, this version is slightly different from the contest entry -- I cleaned up a few typos and grammatical errors and some idiotic word-repetitions. All sentence-level stuff. Since this is another Munich 'fic, I include a few notes at the end of the story to explain unfamiliar foreign-language phrases and cultural matters. Please be advised that the views of religion expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the author, who simply possesses sufficient imagination to run several blocks in the shoes of a very unhappy atheist. That's why they call it "creative writing". Crossposted from nebroadwe to Höllenbeck (i.e. fm_alchemist, fullservicefma, fma_gen, fma_writers, fma_fiction, and heiderich_love).
Dedication: For all members of the Acoustic Mayhem, past and present, for they too understand the power of good liturgical music.

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Had anyone troubled to take them, the minutes of the 24 December 1922 meeting of the Münchener Raketenklub would have declared the event memorable for two reasons. The first, a happy accident of the calendar, saw Christmas Eve coincide with the club's hundredth meeting. Thus it seemed fitting to solemnize the occasion with toasts and a brief speech from each of the three founding members (Alfons Heiderich, Ludwig Eberhardt, and Hans Unger) as well as celebrate the holiday with a potluck supper.

The second was purely an inside joke: Edward Elric returned home from the party too full to sleep.

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