#smirkfortyvibes

[dufrau]

top 5 memorable ronance fic scenes?

OOF. Okay. Listen. So. Some of these are smutty because that is what is memorable to me I guess lol.

5. The entire @lesbianlotties ronance gun smut.

4. Not A Scene exactly but the tension of the framing of @eskawrites CFDAU via the interview sections. Its sort of one scene broken up across a lot of scenes, right? But just the foreshadowing and the way those scenes controlled the momentum of that fic.

3. This is a weird one but the drunk nancy ronance hookup from @ronanception Robin POV side story for Architect. It's so upsetting and sad but it's so real and important to the reading of the main story for me!

2. Just the entirely of Eska's Werewolves one shot. The closing in feeling of the basement until its just Nancy and her feelings and the safety and warmth of it and the littleness and bigness of every part of it. Just a perfect story to me.

Again not one scene but the alleyway head and then Nancy's subsequent "If you wanted to be the one on your knees in that alley" phone call from @monstrous-femme In Her Hips. This is always floating around in my brain somewhere.

[dufrau]

hmm. no felonies, you say? how about "face"?

Ah! A winner! From Bigfoot 4:

There had been a time when Nancy could look at Robin Buckley's face and see nothing but a girl looking back at her.

[dufrau]

top 5 breakfast foods?

I probably can't just say "sausage egg mcmuffin" five times huh?

Okay FOR THE RECORD I am a savory guy. I understand that sweet breakfast foods taste objectively good but I can't wrap my mind around them as A Meal. So they are not on this list because I just don't ever order them.

5. Biscuits and gravy. I will eat this like once per year because it's too much food and it's too heavy and it makes me feel like garbage. But it's also delicious and sometimes I want it. I would add chicken fried steak here as an honorable mention with all the same reasoning but between the two I will almost always get the biscuits and gravy.

4. Hash and eggs. Still heavy but there's some potatoes and onions in there so it's almost real food. There was a place near my old apartment that did a hash with like carnitas in it and it was so good I want to cry from missing it. Once I was eating that hash at that bar and a man threatened to chop me in half because my bloody Mary had two olives in it and according to him that meant I thought I was James Bond? Which was a bad thing I guess? I survived and it was worth it.

3. Omelet. Usually I get American cheese and tomatoes and either ham or bacon in there, and a side of home fries. I had this for breakfast today. I put a lot of Frank's Red Hot on it. It was very good. I took a nap after.

2. Breakfast Burrito. If I'm not eating meat I like a breakfast burrito over a breakfast sandwich because there are beans and salsa in there and it's fresh and delicious. Obviously you can get them with meat too but if I'm gonna get meat I might as well have a

1. Sausage Egg Mcmuffin.

[dufrau]

ronance elevator!

Okay this one I started in May and havent looked at since and it turns out there is only 222 words written so far and not really anything worth sharing. But I think this was/is going to be a hurt/comfort thing where theyre stuck in an elevator and Robin is claustrophobic and Nancy is trying to calm her down but she's very bad at it? I dont know. Maybe it will be funny! I might never write it! I had forgotten about it until I went digging for this game lol. But so far it is literally just a description of a hospital room.

[dufrau]

Curious about your feelings on Clark's as a boot brand? (I have a pair of clark's men's desert boots that I bought about a decade ago for archaeological field work and then ended up really liking for actual kinda hipster-y academia style outfits too, and they've held up really well, but I don't actually know much about the company's overall reputation in the boot world!)

So Clarks aren't my style personally, for whatever reason chukkas just have never really appealed to me? (I guess they make things other than chukka's but when I think of Clarks I think chukka.) I just prefer chonkier, heavier shoes. But I also don't use my shoes for archeological field work but rather just for walking from the passenger seat to the bar stool and back again, so its definitely a different use case lol.

But I think, even though the aesthetic is different, Clarks fall into the same vague genre as Blundstones, sort of the boot/sneaker hybrid zone? Lightweight and comfortable but tougher and more serious looking than just wearing sneakers. Easy to put on. I think everybody who likes chukkas probably owns a pair of desert boots, they're kind of the iconic chukka.

They're kind of Dad boots tbh? (I say this nonjudgmentally as a person who has often been called Dadlike.) But what I mean is they're not flashy so they don't really go out of style, they're affordable and versatile and they can take a minor beating, so you don't need to worry about buying shoes very often.

The price looks right where it should be, also. Goodyear welted boots under $200 is a good deal. You're not getting anything fancy but they aren't pretending to be fancy. Just a good shoe, in my opinion!

[dufrau]

here's a word for you, if you still want 'em: harpoon!

Lol okay. This one is going to take some thought! I'll roll it (carefully) around in my brain until I can figure out where to put it. I'm sorry to say that Nancy is thus far not in possession of a harpoon in anything I am currently working on, but she probably wishes she had one, so. We'll see what we can do.

[dufrau]

asks to help while away the steak-minding hours:

ok, but what KIND of beans are nancy's emergency beans? Does she have a preference?

I think she has every kind she could find, and lots of them. But I think she went through the baked beans and chili beans and anything that actually tastes like anything pretty quickly, so now she has a ton of just plain canned and dried beans. And she hates cooking the dried beans because she's impatient and they're either half-raw or exploded all to hell by the time she's done with them so she mostly eats the canned beans and they aren't really meant to be eaten plain if you want to enjoy yourself.

She's just not a cook. She eats to live. So even the vegetables she grows and the meat she catches winds up bland and over or undercooked. I think she grew up in this universe with an overbearing mother and then the pressures of being on TV etc I don't think she really ever let herself enjoy food very much? These are apocalypse beans and trauma beans but eventually they are love beans too because even if her cooking is bad and she doesn't enjoy it it's something Robin used to do for her and that meant something so it means something when she does it for Robin.

[dufrau]

29, 33, and 43 for the ask gaaaaaame!

29. A reason I’ve lied to a friend?

I think just normal ways? Like. When I think their boyfriends suck in non-dangerous ways or when they want to know if i like an article of clothing i have no opinion on or that I don't mind going to some awful too crowded club when we could be anywhere else in the world. But besides just like in the interest of politeness I don't really bother lying to people very often.

33: What words make me feel the best about myself?

Like what words do I like to be described with? I guess Handsome. Cute. Charming. Big. Strong. Funny. Smart. Just very basic stuff. Just tell me you like me for almost any reason at all and that reason will probably become important to me tbh 🤷

43. Sexiest person that comes to my mind immediately?

Moiraine Sedai. Or like. Rosamund Pike As Moiraine Sedai. Either way.

(questions)

[dufrau]

YOU CANNOT ASK ME THIS I LOVE THEM ALL TOO MUCH TO DECIDE

YOU HAVE TO PICK ONE OR I WILL DELETE THEM ALL!

(you dont have to do anything! thank you!!! <3)

[dufrau]

Some asks for your pink drink everyday/thursday!

If Robin and Nancy were (non-human) animals, what animal do you think each of them would be?

What's something you're looking forward to in the next few days or weeks?

Oh man you're roping me into furry business with this one. Like what do they look like? I think Nancy looks like a cat or a bat or like a fox or something. Robin looks like a deer maybe? Or their personalities like I dont know which animals are friends with each other really? I know "black cat golden retriever" is the trope and people think its cute or they hate it, personally i dont care either way about it. But I would think they would be animals of the same species, like those two lesbian chickens from that one post. or like bonded cats who werent raised together but bonded inexplicably at the shelter?

I dont really have anything going on in the next few days but in 3 weeks im going to drink beers in the mountains in vermont and i always find that very refreshing, and then like a week after that im going to see tegan and sara with one of my best friends in the world who I met 20 years ago AT a tegan and sara show. And like a week after that Im turning 40 which is pretty insane but what can you do

[dufrau]

Your fics are so frickin' Rich, dude.

They have such specific, strong, immersive Moods to them - when I think back about your fics, they feel almost dreamy to me, and they each have these really particular emotional vibes that come through so clearly and really stick with you!

And not ever in any kind of 'one note' way - there's so much texture and nuance and complexity conveyed through your descriptions of setting and actions, through the way you play with sentence structure and repetition, through banter and through the things the characters talk around instead of saying out loud, through the way you weave humor and tragedy together in a way that strengthens both. You are so so good and establishing tone, but then being able to sort of flip it and play around with it in fun/surprising/painful ways. It is very impressive and very fun to read.

Also, your character voices are fucking spot on and always a goddamn delight.

🥹🥹🥹

this is so nice man 😭

for real though the thing that made me write the first ronance thing I wrote was like... i wanted a fic that FELT a certain way. there were definitely plenty of ronance fics already and some really good ones too but i was like... i need this particular vibe??? and thats sort of been the driving force except when i get caught up in something and sometimes other things take over. like obviously TLOU was kind of plotty (robin TLOU is very plotty too so far) and Bigfoot has become very character focused and the Halloween Fair is mayhem, but besides that I'm mostly just chasing a vibe in everything i think?

The biggest challenge in this robin POV right now is there's pretty much no dialogue for most of it and i feel like a lot of my Robin characterization comes via dialogue so Im like... I need to figure out where I can fit some internal monologue digressions in the middle of all of this awful trauma lol.

thank you so much <3<3<3

[dufrau]

how about ... "sharp"?

There is Precisely One Sharp:

"Have you got a better idea?" Nancy asked. She had expected it, had meant for it, to come out loud and sharp, but she had barely been able to muster the energy for a passive aggressive mumble.

[dufrau]

if you could choose to be reincarnated after you die as anything other than a human, what would you choose?

Maybe like a tree? I just want to relax and I wouldnt mind having birds living on me i guess. But I don't like ants and I guess probably there would be ants crawling on me. Ahh man.

Maybe like a clam? Dig a hole in the sand and live there until somebody cooks me to death? I don't especially want to be cooked to death but it might be fine.

Maybe a whale thats so big nothing can really hurt it. then the ocean wouldnt be so scary. Probably that's it. A blue whale snacking plankton through my baleen living that Big Giant Guy life.

[dufrau]

Ooh, wait - adding on to the "amazing hangover meal in a strange city" ... it's like an early lunch/late breakfast after a very late night out with a big group of friends/acquaintances where you probably wouldn't have gone out at all and you definitely wouldn't be nearly this hungover if it weren't for the fact that the person you are hopelessly into was there too and was going all out

okay picture it structured like...

open on nancy and robin eating breakfast in silence and robin being like... we have to talk about it

and then there's the whole insane drunken party thing full pining and of stupid stunts to impress each other like i dunno climbing milk crates to try to slam dunk a basketball etc etc and you think its gonna be about that or that they hooked up or

but then it just keeps going through them still being awake and going out for breakfast and its still pining and its still cute and youre like making theyre gonna kiss but they dont, they just go to breakfast, but then it turns out the breakfast place isnt even a restaurant its some kind creepy forest witch cannibal kind of deal but nancy just, like, shoots everybody.

and then they eat breakfast.

[dufrau]

what about like ... the feeling of finding the most sublimely, unexpectedly delicious and satisfying meal you've ever tasted at some random, grungy-looking hole in the wall restaurant on a hot day in a strange city when you are SUPER hung over?

okay but morning-after breakfast is SUCH a vibe. (a lot of the things i consider vibes are maybe just breakfast??? BUT REGARDLESS.)

This specific thing you're saying is giving me big hansel and gretel vibes though??? like this sounds too good to be true these bitches are in trouble. good thing nancy is armed. oh this is really fun to think about though.

[dufrau]

asks to help while away the steak-minding hours:

what's your favorite line(s) you wrote from any of your last few fics and why?

OKAY.

::cracks knuckles::

IT'S BRAGGING TIME.

From Love Minus Zero I like almost every line. I think of that one as kind of a poem and I think it works as an object, and none of the lines in it are better than the effect of them all together. EXCEPT. The last line. I hate it! It's wrong. I whiffed on it. It should be "I really and sincerely cannot believe it" or something along those lines but I am too precious about the form of it at exactly 1000 words that I don't want to change it even though it needs to be changed!

From Into Dust I really like this section:

Nancy had come to this party to kiss Ryan Garber. She had a checklist and he was a not entirely repulsive way to cross off a lot of it all at once. Kiss a boy. Get a boyfriend. Have sex. Her list used to include Fall in love, but she had scribbled that out a long time ago. That was something Barbie dolls and characters in movies did. That wasn't real life.

Barb wasn't anywhere on her list, not officially. But she was everywhere, too. She was in between the lines and doodled in the margins. She was unwritten. She could never be erased or scribbled out.

It's sad and prescient and like, I feel like it really establishes the seeds of who Nancy is in that universe that she could turn into the person she winds up being in My Piece of Land.

And I'm gonna be honest I really like some of the dirtier lines in Tits Out but I don't want to pull quote them because it's embarrassing lol. I just really like the contrast in that story between filth and humor. Like I think that it's genuinely very funny and kind of strangely wholesome and I am actually very proud of it even if it is just porn at the end of the day.