An egotistical supervillain, thrown back in time by her sidekick, must work with her past self--and her ex-girlfriend-turned-superhero, in order to find her way home.
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Rory Lennox, also known as the supervillain Ridge, always gets what she wants. A...
Hello, and thank you so, so much for reaching the end of Always/Never! This is my ending author's note, which also, coincidentally, shares the same letters as the title, so, really, both can be called A/N, which was a completely accidental but nonetheless fitting play on this story being available to you only through words on the Internet :P
This story began because of my love for time travel stories. I've played around with the idea before, but never really wrote one, although I wanted to. After finishing my contemporary story, as well as branching out into different genres, I decided to return to one of my favourite ideas: superheroes. The connection between supernatural abilities and time travel clicked, and from it, this story formed.
In the last semester of my degree, I was burnt out, and also taking a lot of electives to fulfill the last requirements so I could finally graduate. This meant I was taking a lot of classes that I'd never been able to fit into my schedule. My English credits were satisfied, but I took one anyway and landed in my favourite one through all four years. It was a class focused on the campus novel—fiction about university. As it turned out, I didn't even know what a campus novel was, but I've actually written them before, this one now included.
One of the works we read was Don DeLillo's White Noise. I loved this novel, the philosophy, and the way it made me think. In a lot of ways, I hope to do justice to that novel and capture some of its themes in my own way. Of course, this story also has a lot of time travel like Back to the Future, from where making the time travel connected to a particular object pays homage.
I really had a lot of fun with this! Exploring new ideas is always interesting for me, and trying to extend the boundaries of what I write, including topics like philosophy and physics, was cool. And new. And now I've done a lot of research on these subjects. Special mention to MIT Open Courseware, since that's where I learned almost all of my physics stuff.
While the story is different from my others, it also shares a lot in common with my other superhero works, and I think with everything I write, I learn more about myself and become more confident in my ability to keep going. Every time I finish something, I feel elated and proud of myself for sticking with a project for so long. This story is no exception, and though it is much shorter than usual, I managed to keep it that way! Trying to write a shorter novel was my goal this time around, so I'm glad I got to manage that.
Some trivia for this story below:
Why a dryer machine?
I feel like anything could be a time machine, but few things encapsulate one. Few are big enough to fit a person, for starters, but also have a sense of time about them. Washing clothes is something that brings out a sense of the past, either because it takes a while, or because it has been done for generations. There's an endless nature of it, like time, like looking through time. I wanted it to be a dryer for the heat aspect (felt a bit like supercolliders), and because it was a casual act that fit in with the story itself, as well as the larger sense of what time really is.
Why Always/Never? Where does that title come from?
The title goes back far! The earlier version of it is from 2016, one of my very first story ideas. The plot was convoluted, but followed two characters (one called Astra, a name I reused in Legacy to Zero). Essentially, the title was meant to represent two characters, who started out on either side (one being always, the other representing never) who gradually change and swap places. This sort of duality functions really well in a time travel story, where a past self can be either the same or different from the current one. In the beginning, Rory/Ridge is 'always (get what she wants)' and Accha/Michaela is 'never (has the time anymore).' Through the story, they develop, swap places, and live on both sides of an always/never coin. Thus, the slash, rather than presenting both words together; they're opposites, but only by a slight margin.
Special thank you to -MilaSteele for making the cover for this story, and this GIF! You are amazing, and I'm so grateful for both. <3
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I hope you enjoyed the story! Like everything I write, it includes a lot of me within it, and I'm really happy that I was able to have fun with it!
