26. What would you describe as OOC?

generally? it's hard to describe? like, it's like Ye Olde Definition of obscenity: "i know it when i see it."

specifically? anyone calling jonathan byers "jon." jonathan and nancy using "babe" or "baby" or "honey" or pet names like that. pretty much any character written without a sense of humor.

if i can't hear it in the character's voice, it's OOC. if i can't feel its roots in the canon text it's OOC. (that doesn't mean it has to happen but like, if i'm sitting here going 'when has X ever done something remotely like that' ya done fucked up). and if i can hear it in the AUTHOR'S voice, then it's the OOCest of OOC.

that's a terrible answer, but it's the best i can do.

31. What was the most difficult fic for you to write (but in the end you made it)?

"untitled document". that fic was an absolute bitch. DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO WRITE LOVE LETTERS??? THAT AREN'T YOUR OWN??????????

HI SORRY IT'S THE HOLIDAY SEASON LIFE GOT BUSY i'm back on my answering asks game:

2. Anything that you'd like to write but feel like you're unable to?

Like, so many things? There are active WIPs that are stuck, there are ideas that are stuck, there are entire genres and tropes I feel like I don't the skill or ability to do. Writing is eternal dissatisfaction, I swear.

15. What's your favourite plotless fic you have written?

Ooooh. Hmmmmmmmmm. Honestly probably like all of the birb prompt fics from that one post that went around, the one with the beautiful paintings of birds with INSANE titles like "if you clone me, my first order of business will be to kill you all" and honestly y'all sent so many prompts and they're all so unhinged and the only one that has a plot is "moments when my gaze go vacant" so i'm gonna say "all the other birb prompts." they're all in my ao3 under "Polaroids"

30. Describe a fic that almost happened, but then it didn't

I got a fic prompt for Jancy that was "Do you still love me?" and i wrote something so angsty I couldn't actually finish it and it has never been worked on since.

looooool an anon beat you to this by like 1 minute

here, have some kissing to make up for it

What is it about watching the same two idiots falling in love over and over again?

dude i do not know but it's like craaaaaaaaaack, like, the pleasure of getting to get these two dummies to kiss over and over in every possible way is THE BEST.

Thoughts on cliffhangers.

i love them only if we get resolution in a sequel (or if the author finishes the wip), otherwise i will rage forever about it. i can't bear to write them without resolving them.

Top three favorite fic tropes

One bed what do?, Fake dating/marriage, and.... enemies to lovers, probs. Or requited feelings we think are unrequited/talking at cross-purposes (whatever that's officially called)

Past or present tense? Why?

honestly, no real general preference, just what feels right for the story. i think i typically write in present tense because it feels more natural and it also lets me do flashbacks simply by switching tenses (or without having to go to past perfect or past perfect continuous tense, which is trickier to write consistently) and not having to do things like italicize or put in visual breaks.

to the nonny who just sent me the url of a stancy gifset with a “:(” -- yeah, dude, people ship stancy just like i ship jancy and they’re gonna make gifsets and write fics of their ship the same way i do with my ship.

i cannot stress this enough: CURATE YOUR FANDOM EXPERIENCE. fandom is not some sort of zero sum contest in which the goal is to convert everyone to your ship. block stancy blogs, block stancy tags, don’t go in said tags, and ignore posts that aren’t for you. just keep scrolling. 

idk what you wanted to accomplish by sending me that. i do not care that it exists. (i also watched season 4; i i knew by the URL what gifs they were gonna pull and i’m over it.) i’m not here to fight anyone on the ship they ship. 

i think jonathan and nancy are soulmates, and i think jonathan and nancy are gonna end up together because i can’t imagine it going any other way. i think they’ve been building it up this whole time. and we’ll see what happens, because i do not write this show. if it doesn’t go that way, well, that’s what fix-it fic is for. 

in the meantime, i’m not gonna get into the ship wars fray. i’m here to enjoy the things about stranger things that i enjoy. i’m not here to pick fights with people. 

curate. your. fandom. experience.

in every possible way

in every possible way (or: five things nancy wheeler learned about family by having her own)

for @jancyweek2022​ day 5: family 

this is set in my future perfect ‘verse, so that would be some good/necessary context for this, for what it’s worth. (and yes, i said they had 2 kids. this is just part of the first one.) 

read it on ao3

oh my life is changing every day in every possible way and oh my dreams are never quite as they seem never quite as they seem

1. some big decisions feel very small

They toss it around for years, the idea of it. In fact, for a long time an idea is all it is.

She’s the lowest reporter on the newspaper totem pole, working the shittiest stories in the shittiest neighborhoods at the shittiest times of day. He’s trying to fully establish himself as a photographer and picking up bartending shifts on every night he doesn’t have a shoot booked.

And of course there’s the weekends they “go away” for some private time investigating thin spots in the world that may or may not be gates. Their friends think they have an extremely healthy marriage, putting each other first above all else.

Nancy thinks they have an extremely healthy marriage, because after you’ve fought monsters and saved the world together everything else seems like a piece of cake.

Well. Most everything else. That one thing her mother always brings up when she calls, that’s more daunting to her than any Demogorgon or gate ever was.

They’re in no rush, really. And the timing never seems right.

Do you think we should have a baby? She asks him after she says goodbye to her mother and he studies the stack of bills on the coffee table. He smirks at her.

I think we should make sure we can pay the light bill first.

oh nonny, your faith is inspiring but this is a very 50/50 chance. i have something in the works (and another thing that's been in the works so long i may need to abandon it) but also i've got a bigger, longer story in progress for another day this week and it may end up taking up all my brain cells.

we'll see. but i appreciate this message :)

something to look forward to

for @jancyweek2022 day one: lyrics

spoon: something to look forward to

So many things we could say So many things we could let get out But let stay in instead Some things are best left unsaid 

She had a whole speech prepared.

She’s been practicing it in her head for days now, for weeks, from over the desks in the school newspaper office and to the passenger seat of the Winnebago they stole. A carefully crafted lecture about honesty and communication and how he’s not nearly as mysterious as he thinks, and they’re a team, aren’t they, whether they’re fighting monsters or applying to college.

She repeated it every morning when she woke up and every night before she fell asleep. Ready to go, so that when she saw him again – and despite all the fear and the buzzing panic of his disconnected phone line she knew, in the pit of her stomach the center of her heart, that she would indeed see him again, she would – it would be the first thing out of her mouth.

And then she does, and it’s not.

F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

God, I hate these questions if only because I'm never quite sure how to answer them. But after some though, this bit between Jonathan and Joyce from Paper Tiger sprang to mind:

“Jonathan,” his mother says and gestures towards the sofa. He doesn’t move. “Please, can you just sit down?”

“Mom,” his voice cracks as he says it and he wants to hate himself for it but there are too many other feelings warring inside him. He pushes them aside, trying to find hope buried beneath them. “Time for a bigger house?”

“Something like that,” she perches on the arm of the sofa, ankles crossed and hands clasped. She’s nervous, he realizes. 

“In Hawkins, right?”

She looks so sad as she shakes her head no.

“Mom.” Tears spring into his eyes against his will and he swallows against the lump in his throat. “Come on, Mom, please. It’s not—Please. Please don’t do this.” 

“I need to,” her voice is soft, as gentle and kind as any night she soothed him through his father’s abuse or his loneliness at school. That makes it worse somehow. “We all need to. Will and El, they need to get away from here too. We need a fresh start.”

“I don’t need to. I’m fine. I’m—I’ve got Nancy. I’m almost done with school. Mom, please—”

“I know, sweetheart, I know. But you need the fresh start, too. We all do. We can’t live like this anymore.”

It just.. sounds like them. I can hear it out of their mouths, their tone, their inflection, where their voices would crack. I can hear Charlie and Winona's performance of this dialogue, if that makes sense. Like if you turned this scene into a script and handed it to them, they'd get it right in the table read.

I'm always proud when I can write something that feels that in-character. And I found myself thinking about this scene a lot when I was writing their conversation in "in the morning i'll be better" because in some ways, they're finishing the talks they had in Paper Tiger.

I actually like most or the dialogue in Paper Tiger a lot, now that I think about it. It feels extremely in character, very true. Nancy trying to outsmart Joyce when they suspect the moving, their own conversation after Jonathan finds out, Jonathan trying to obliquely interrogate his mom about it while washing dishes after dinner. It all feels like it could be part of the show, and I’m very proud of that.

(p.s. to the duffer brothers: let jonathan and his mother fucking talk in season 5 or i'm coming after you.)

G: Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?

Both, honestly. I'd say about 90% of the time it's in order, from beginning to end. About 30% of that 90% of the time I will skip ahead to get out a scene that is distracting me from writing in order so I can move past it and get back to writing in order. And maybe 10% of the time will I write a story entirely out of order, or collect many scenes and/or snippets and then turn them into a cohesive story.

That fully out of order approach actually works against me most of the time, I think. I currently have WIP doc for a sequel(ish) to "in the morning i'll be better" that is comprised of a bunch of notes and snippets and i haven't been able to write a word in it for weeks. most likely i'll have to move all those notes over to another doc and wipe that one clean so I can actually write. My brain just really doesn't work that way. But I do keep notes about future scenes/plot points/emotional beats (even lines of dialogue) as they come into my head so I don't forget.

S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

I mean, have you read my stories? LOL. Sharing the bed, mutual pining, slow burn, partners in crime, idiots in love, fake dating, fake married, domesticity shenanigans, AUs, i love sooooooooo many tropes. Perhaps I read some of them more than I write some of them but hoooo boy I'm a sucker for a lot of them.

N: Is there a fic you wish someone else would write (or finish) for you?

Oh man for sure and @wanderleave has like half of them in our chat/her inbox somewhere because I am desperate.

I'd say my 90s AU but LBR -- I would never give that baby up. If anyone wants to dropkick my brain into gear on it, though, I'd be appreciative :)

V: If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

OH MAN.  this is actually a hell of a question.

I would love to write an interlude for winter violets in the spring, between the first and second parts, in which we can see jonathan and nancy get back together (and kissiiiiiing) but I truly don’t think I could do it justice. That story is so restrained, so specifically moody, that I don’t know if I have it in me. 

(P.S. if you have never read winter violets in the spring, go read it NOW. it may be the best future AU getting back together slow burn monster hunting fic in the entire jancy fandom, it is brilliant.)

the thing is, in trying to answer this question I’m really just thinking of stories that I want sequels and prequels to, but I don’t want to write them myself. I love those stories for how the authors wrote them, how they interpreted the characters and relationships. I don’t think I’d like what I produce anywhere near as much.

X: A character you enjoy making suffer.

Enjoy is probably the wrong word, but lord knows making both Jonathan and Nancy suffer is part of what I do best.

Y: A character you want to protect.

Jonathan. I will fight.

K: What’s the angstiest idea you’ve ever come up with?

Someone once sent me an ask box prompt of "do you still love me?" and I came up with a college AU breakup/makeup fic that I got like 3500 words into and I was so upset with myself I couldn't finish it. It taunts me to this day. I've also thought of like 15 ways to make it less angsty and finishable but i think it's gonna sit there and taunt me for the rest of time.

what the fuck is this? lol

this came to my fic blog and another ask for the same fic came to my main blog and that answer is here.

privacy, privacy, always in such short supply...