The Rest of Your Life by Candle Beck (NC-17)

[unlovablehands.livejournal.com]

Hi, I'm Ang, and I'll be driving the van for one of this month's featured small fandoms: baseball RPF. I'm afraid the fandom is such that an overview is functionally impossible, so I'm just going to jump right in with the recs.

Fandom: MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL RPF
Pairing: Eric Chavez/Eric Munson
Length: around 200,000 words
Author on LJ: candle_beck
Author Website: None
Why this must be read:

The Rest of Your Life is the story that got me into baseball fic in the first place. It's a long, sprawling story, spanning the lives of two professional baseball players from when they were best friends as kids to when they were grown men whose lives didn't go precisely as planned.

Candle Beck is one of the best writers in baseball fandom for making readers really feel how heartbreakingly beautiful the game is. Her stories break my heart as much as the game itself does sometimes, and Candle Beck's ability to seamlessly tie the heartbreak of a relationship to the heartbreak of baseball's mythos is what makes me keep coming back to her journal for more.

You don't need to understand, much less love, baseball to read The Rest of Your Life, but reading it made me remember all the things about the game I loved, even if maybe it wasn't so sensible of me to feel that way.

The Rest of Your Life

Comments

[abcfangirl.livejournal.com]

The thing about candle_beck is, she's not just the best writer in baseball fandom, she's one of the best writer in fandom in my opinion (I have been reading her spn stories), but a lot of her stories do not have a happy ending, and with her ability, that could be devastating. I am willing to read any story she wrote in a fandom I have never heard of (such as this one), but is this 200,000 word epic going to leave me crying in a corner for a few days? I don't mind heartbreak in the middle, as long as it end in a happy or hopeful note.

[unlovablehands.livejournal.com]

I would say this story is pretty sad -- it's kind of a theme in baseball fic -- and it certainly made me cry when I read it, but the middle bits more than the end. I wouldn't call it a happy ending, more like bittersweet, perhaps?