I’d like to thank that kid on the Buy Nothing group who gifted me this t-shirt!

The Roncy QBC #12 was on June 30, 2026

and I’m writing about it on August 3 because shit happened when I was done writing the post about The Roncy QBC #11: IT GOT FUCKING DELETED.

The grief

It takes me more than 6 hours to write each post. I had just written the post about #10, I was finishing #11 and getting ready to write #12 the next day to finally catch up, when Safari crashed! $&§%@!?!!!!

My browser usually has 200 open tabs, and that day, it barely had 5, which means that I had just decided to close the whole window forever and restart the browser anew. With 200 open tabs, Safari (which is Apple’s browser) had NEVER crashed. This is how efficient it usually is. Instead of crashing, the RAM would just saturate and I’d restart the laptop.

But that time, Safari crashed. And I was writing my post directly online, in the back office of my website. As I do. Because I can do the layout and save the document as I go (which is not something FB allowed me to do when I was posting these reports on FB, so I’d write them on a Pages (Apple's equivalent of Word) document offline.

My website is hosted by Squarespace and I had just paid a fortune for this year’s invoice, like, 2 days earlier (and I’m broke, so these fixed costs are killing me), so I thought I might as well use that website. When Safari crashed and I logged back in on my website, the draft was gone. Only the first hour or two of writing were available. Not the next 5 hours. I was five minutes away from posting the article when the crash happened.

I was devastated! Speechless. This couldn’t be. So I needed a minute to collect my thoughts and redirect my outrage: whom was I gonna sue? Apple or Squarespace? Someone had to pay. I was not gonna rewrite that whole thing without compensation.

I immediately started writing about something else, the movies I was watching as a challenge, the Forcing Myself To Watch Movies challenge! I did not stop writing entirely. I did not keep writing about The Roncy QBC, but I kept writing. And that’s what I’m noticing: writers who are "not writing" are actually writing all the time. Just not what they’re "supposed" to write. And by writers, I mean me.

As you can see, it took me weeks to grieve those thousands of deleted words and admit to myself that I would never get them back. As I’m writing this post about QBC #12 (in a Pages document, I learned my lesson. Premier gaou n’est pas gaou), I still haven’t returned to that deleted post! I wonder if I ever will. Or if I should post whatever is left of it: that first hour or two.

I’ve also decided that I couldn’t afford to spend 6 hours writing each of these posts every week (I’m not Léna Situations), so I will have to go straight to the point. But it isn’t looking well, is it? Haven’t you just read 530 words about everything but The Roncy QBC #12? Should I apologize?

I hope you’ll still enjoy whatever editorial direction these posts will take, moving forward.

Getting down to business

Enough about me. At The Roncesvalles Quiet Book Club #12, we had 3 readers and 3 writers.

“Enough about me”, she says, as she uploads another picture of herself

Margie

I was glad to see Margie return after her first time at #11! She was officially a regular, and I’m pretty sure I told her that. Yes, I’m that easy: it takes two sessions to be considered a regular. Or a recidivist, if you will.

Margie introduced me to the Discworld universe, as she introduced the novel she had brought: LORDS AND LADIES, a fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett. I recognized the name of the co-author of GOOD OMENS! I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Fantasy is one of my least favourite genres (along with body horror, spirituality, and sci-fi), but Pratchett tricked me with GOOD OMENS, the way Beyoncé made me a fan by making a country album (I don’t even like country music, so I had my guard down). Or like a straight person (heterosexual and heteroromantic) falls in love with one person of the same sex, and that person only… Sometimes what is for you is not in the bin of the things you usually like. Check out the other bins. I’m so fucking wise.

Margie read out loud the quote that stood out to her:

SOMEBODY: "It shouldn’t be like this."

WITCH: "There isn’t a way things should be. There’s just what happens and what we do."

So we have a stoic witch in the Discworld. I wonder if Terry Pratchett is the stoic witch.

The vocabulary entry Margie retired was:

MIMETIC (adj.): 1. Imitative. 2. Relating to, characterized by, or exhibiting mimicry.

Carianne

Chief Queering Officer Carianne returned to their Tuesday "desk" to open a book (and my mind while they were at it) to non-queer romance: OUR PERFECT STORM by Toronto journalist Carley Fortune.

It’s a story of best friends becoming lovers, one of my least favorite tropes! I love enemies to lovers, rivals to lovers; exes to lovers (second-chance romance) not so much (except if at least one of the exes started HATING the other), but what triggers me every time (especially in BL): best friends to lovers.

Some people fantasize about falling in love with their friends or best friends, but to me, it’s borderline incestuous, even more so when the protagonists grew up together. I consider childhood friends as family, even if we catch up every 25 years. We don’t need to be blood relatives or emotionally close to be family. And intercourse within the family creeps me out. Yes, I’m not ashamed to admit that it creeps me out that married couples, who have spent their lives together, have sex. They’re family now! They’re no different from siblings, they share a name, a whole history together, they should fuck strangers, not each other. But that’s just me, you keep doing you. Maybe I should be ashamed of that controversial take.

Enough about me, I had said, and here I am.

Carianne let me take pictures of them. As I didn’t deem my outfit of the day thumbnail-worthy, I needed another ambassador for the session. So I picked Carianne! I think I just needed an excuse to take more pictures of their tattoos for my own leisure.

Carianne retired two quotes from OUR PERFECT STORM during the session:

"In the morning, a heavy spring rain attacked the last of the snow, liberating purple and white crocus blossoms from their icy beds."

"A metal scouring pad couldn’t wipe the smile from my face."

Margie and Buffy laughed. I acknowledged that I didn’t know what a scouring pad was. Someone explained that it was some sort of metal sponge, and I understood immediately:

"AAAAAAH! In Cameroon we call it le koutcha. And when I was growing up there, girls usually relaxed their hair and boys would shave theirs. If someone actually grew their 4C hair and didn’t relax it, we’d tell them their hair was like le koutcha."

My non-Black audience was both amused and saddened. I took Carianne’s book and QVC to put them on my table as I shrugged:

"Black on Black violence."

They opted for being amused; I heard it in their giggles.

Olivia

Olivia returned with the goal to write her '“PLAY! PLAY! PLAY! PLAY! PLAY! I will write a damn play!!!!!” I can’t remember how it went (I’m sad about all those details I forgot and that will never end up in the national archives of the Roncesvalles Quiet Book Club). But judging by the presence of her pink notebook in the group photo, I assume she did manage to write her damn play.

Buffy

Buffy brought ONE book to read at the Roncy QBC, and that was on April 7, at the Roncy QBC #1! Ever since, she has only brought her manuscript. But not this time! For The Roncy QBC #12, she decided to bring some homework: she would work on an art proposal, and she intended to use this time together to devise what she called on the sign-up sheet “the dreaded bio”.

I had to bite my tongue not to offer my help (that’s the kind of thing I love to write. When I first started my company Profession:Scribe in 2015, I was offering editorial services to artists: bios and other written content in French and English). Before I told Buffy, “Hey, let me write it for you!”, I remembered that I was already very busy as it is, so I said nothing. It’s not a saviour complex, it’s just ADHD (impulse control, or lack thereof).

I did mention, however, that I loved writing and rewriting my bios and that my goal was to end up with one just as cool as Rachel Reid’s. And they all looked both horrified and amused. I don’t know how I pronounced that name, but they all thought about someone else that I didn’t know. What other person, you might ask? Beats me. That’s another detail that is lost forever in the abyss of my memory. And that’s OK. Then I tried to pronounce “Rachel Reid” a different way, and that’s when Olivia hesitantly asked,

“The writer of HEATED RIVALRY?”
“Yes”, I confirmed, to everyone’s relief.

And here I thought HEATED RIVALRY was the hard part to pronounce.

“Well, Rachel Reid has the most hilarious short bio on the back cover of her books.”

I tried to say it from memory, and I crashed (what was I thinking?). Here’s the bio, for you patient Gazette readers:

“RACHEL REID has always lived in Nova Scotia, Canada, and will likely continue to do so. She has two boring degrees and two interesting sons. She has been a hockey fan since childhood, but sadly never made it to the NHL herself.”

Y’all: I’ve just found out that Rachel Reid has a journal on her website! Of course she does! Do writers ever stop writing? I have so much to read, consider me happy.

Back to Buffy: I remember that she struggled with her short bio and didn’t write it then. I can’t remember if she at least made any progress on her art proposal.

Jo

Next on my list was me, who came to write QBC Gazette #10 (“and #11 inch’a life”). I started writing the report on QBC #10 on a sheet of paper, with a pencil, and it went well. I had struggled to remember the word “corduroy” to describe the pants I was wearing to mark the 10th session. I believe Buffy is the one who managed, from my strange description, to guess the word I was looking for. Note to self: Buffy would make an excellent partner at Pictionary.

It is weird, INCEPTION-level weird, to think that QBC #10 was written during QBC #12 and thus mentioned elements of QBC #12. If you want to know what happened during QBC #12, maybe you should read QBC #10 again.

Ann

Ann must have arrived during quiet time because she filled up the sign-up sheet after me. She brought the same book as the week before (QBC #11, that I have yet to rewrite, another INCEPTION oddity in the making): THE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE by Matt Haig. I can’t remember if she grabbed a Quote & Vocabulary Card on my table when she arrived, but if she did, she didn’t fill it out.

The Roncy QBC #12 group photo! Buffy’s notebook is missing.

When it was time to share updates, again I was the only one sharing anything. Buffy and Olivia offered to give me moving boxes and wrapping supplies respectively, but my packing wasn’t going so well, I was still living in an ocean of empty boxes I couldn’t bring myself to pack. It was hard for me to tell if they were enough or if I needed more. I updated the gang about my house hunt, the gorgeous hunt I had seen the day before and how I was not the type to “manifest” or think hard about something I really want. I’d rather forget about something I really want, until that thing confirms to want me back. When I got back home, I received a text from the owner of that gorgeous house, asking me when I wanted to move in!

This concludes the Roncy QBC #12. I’m glad to be back, blogging about this weekly gathering again.

#FunnyBrainyRoncy #Roncesvalles #RoncesvallesVillage

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This post was NOT published on Fakeboob.

All the books mentioned here can be ordered on anotherstory.ca or borrowed from the Toronto Public Library.

Book your free spot at the next Roncesvalles Quiet Book Club here (donations are welcome): https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/the-roncesvalles-quiet-book-club-tickets-1986008762671

The Roncesvalles Quiet Book Club #12