#novemberverse

[winterandwords]

Happy STS! tell me something about Spin Cycle that you developed and exists behind the scenes but is sadly no longer in the draft!

OH MY GOD I'm cracking up that you called it Spin Cycle 🤣 The title Spin Cylinder is a reference to playing Russian roulette, but @thegreatobsesso said it made her think about washing machines and now I can't unsee it. It will forever be the washing machine murder story.

The only thing that didn't make it into the published version was from the discovery draft when I was just braindumping and seeing what came out. It involved Brett torturing a burglar and there was no deep and meaningful reason why it didn't stick. It just didn't fit with everything else that happened. Discovery drafting is like that for me though. Throw the chaos into a document then sort through it later.

[a-technophobiac]

Thumbnails of the leads of game ideas me and my brother work on. Just wanted to remember that these guys existed

[winterandwords]

Happy STS! It is hot and humid- how are your OCs doing in the heat?

Brett and Noah have given up and gone on holiday. They're staying in the Icehotel in Sweden. The trip was inspired by Brett losing his temper and saying, "Fuck this. I just want to climb into a giant freezer and stay there. But a freezer with good drinks and an internet connection."

(OK now I really want to write that)

[winterandwords]

heyyy happy sts!! tell me a fun fact about one of your books that isn't necessarily canon but is to you

*pours drink* *drinks drink* *cracks knuckles*

Right! So I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this in passing on here before, but there's an urban fantasy Novemberverse AU in my head that started when my brain nudged me one day and said, "What if Noah was the actual personification of death?"

And it doesn't fit at all with the stories or the world, but I let little bits of it sneak in. Some mentions of Noah's complicated relationship with time almost treat time like a person. And Brett is basically chaos in human form. Even the side characters and places have shades of being real-world representations of concepts.

It was never really going to be a proper AU, but I loved the idea of Death and Time being people, following each other through situations where they can't really connect for long because it would fuck shit up too much. It immediately felt very traditional noir, so I started writing bits of it a few years ago just to let it out of my head.

Now we're up to two complete pieces of short fiction, one that just needs edited, and another that I've started, in a series called Death and Time Were Lovers. The character of Death still has some things in common with Noah, but he's definitely his own person now in that short fiction series.

That was probably a much longer answer than you were looking for 😅

[winterandwords]

Happy STS! I saw the other STS ask, the one with the cryptids and the blank check, and I wonder - what KIND of fancy clothes? and where do the plane tickets GO?

Noah and Brett have more money that anyone realistically needs (the fruits of their criminal labours) so everything is luxury. Neither of them give a shit about the social value of designer labels, but they both appreciate the hell out of excellent quality.

The perfect example of this is Brett's vicuna wool socks, ten pairs, all black, because he felt them in a shop when he was high and they were so soft that no other socks would ever be good enough again.

The plane tickets (first class, of course) can go to anywhere and everywhere. The important thing is where they go when they get there. It's either a huge, sprawling house nice and far away from everything else, or a fancy hotel in the middle of somewhere touristy but where they can avoid the actual tourists (unless they want to kill them).

[winterandwords]

happy sts! with your character(s), do you have anything that you associate with them? whether that's a colour or food/drink or something else entirely.

Thanks for the ask! There are very specific scents I associate with Noah and Brett from the Novemberverse. They're mentioned in the stories because it's something they notice and associate strongly with each other.

Noah's is cedar and sandalwood and Brett's is cardamom and oakmoss. If I catch a whiff of either of those combinations out in the wild, it turns my brain inside out for a couple of seconds because I forget they're scents that actual real people also wear.

[winterandwords]

oh my god what were murder boys parents like?? is this something we know anything about? who the fucked raised those creatures

LONG ANSWER ALERT!

I don't think I ever go into this in the stories, but they both had very normal unbringings. One of the most significant things about these two as characters is that they aren't operating from a place of trauma. They are literally just terrible people. And because they're also rich and attractive people without the burden of a conscience, they get away with all the terribleness surprisingly easily.

So, in my head Noah was born when his parents were way older than the average parents, so they were dead a long time before November Breaks starts and he rarely thinks about them. He's not great at forming meaningful attachments, never has been, and the concept of family is kind of meh to him. His home life was quiet and calm, regimented but not uncomfortably strict, and that lives on in his compulsive organisation and his intense discomfort around untidiness and interruptions to his routine.

Brett's parents are aggressively upper middle class social climbers who value appearances above all else. His worst nightmare is to be like his father. As a child, he was expected to be perfect, or at least to look perfect from the outside, and his parents weren't particularly interested in him as an actual person. They also had no idea that they were equipping him for a life of expertly covered-up illegal activity by making sure he got really good at hiding anything they would disapprove of. He had gone pretty much no-contact with them by the time November Breaks starts.

[winterandwords]

happy sts!! what is the shittiest job your main character has had to work and why was it so terrible? (i'm assuming murder boys have never had to work shitty jobs soooo maybe one of ur newer guys?)

I think Rafe from the Cityverse stories wins at shitty jobs 🙈 He was forced into sex work in his late teens and the only way he got out of that was to get really good at killing people for money.

As for the murder boys, they didn't have to do these jobs, but Noah would have a list of reasons why being in the police was terrible and Brett's work in tech drove him to drinking in his office at 11am and then having a total breakdown. But they were lucky enough to be able to get out of those jobs without serious consequences 😄