#59: How the witches stay young
Microfiction, postcard art, and year-end wrap!
Welcome to January, you sweet peas!
How is it 2025? It’s the final year of the first quarter of the 21st century, which feels like both a highly specific measurement and a milestone. Rhody and I took a walk today and reflected on all the things that we take for granted now that would’ve been mind-bogglingly futuristic twenty-five years ago. QR codes, anyone?
For the first post of the new year, I’ll…
💌 show ya the watercolors I painted for Postcard Club members and patrons,
💌 share voting results for this month’s prompt,
💌 bring you into a dark New Year’s Tradition with a short story,
💌 and give you a year’s end creative wrap.
✨ A month in postcard art
Every December, Christmas markets polka dot Western Europe, and Toulouse is no exception. The one in the center at Capitole is as chaotic and fevered as possible, and you shuffle elbow to elbow with strangers to ogle lights. But the mulled wine is good and cheap and the lights are charming, so I still went this year. Twice.
But the better Christmas market is near my neighborhood. It’s quieter and each booth features local artists’ handmade ceramics or poems typewritten on cloth. So this month for y’all I watercolored a little night scene of that market - the result isn’t quite Christmasy, which is exactly what I was going for!
🗳 The votes are in
Patrons and full-access subscribers voted for this month’s postcard-fiction prompt:
Action: kissing at midnight
Word: twinkle
Inspiration: the holidaze
Each month after voting closes, I give myself a measly 48 hours to write you a story. This one took your prompts and ran in a strange little direction.
🍾 The tradition of eternal youth
Here’s the postcard I wrote on:
And here’s the story:
My wife Anna and I always kiss strangers at New Year’s, right as tipsy crowds bellow “Auld Lang Syne” off key – a perfect distraction. It’s Tradition. And New Year’s Brunch the morning after? We’ve done that since the coining of “brunch” itself.
Tonight we’re in a packed dive, Anna down the bar, clad in velvet and whispering to a beautiful, gap-toothed woman. She winks at me. My own catch, a devastatingly clever architect named Reggie, smiles. We’ve been talking for hours and I’m so smitten I’m almost drunk on it, which is a problem. Around us, couples speak, close, foreheads touching, while others FaceTime far-off lovers.
Reggie gestures with his glass. “Like a rabbit warren, huh? Everyone pairing up, and so packed we’re all crawling over each other.”
I laugh. “Did you know they sometimes eat their young?”
He gawks before laughing too. “Well, that’s romantic. You always woo with cannibalism?”
At that – his architect’s frankness – I grin. We’re three minutes from midnight. Reggie cracks a clever joke about rabbit cannibals, scooting nearer, and my stomach turns over what the Tradition demands I do with that kiss, all to stay young. Now that he’s close enough I notice more blonde peppering his beard than I have in mine, I can’t help picturing another path, a future where we all three eat lasagna, cackling together over something scathing Anna said. Reggie swats her arm – they’d be great friends – and after dinner we play Scrabble and I kiss Reggie for playing a seven-letter word, then Anna for winning, and before Reggie returns to his Architect-perfect apartment, he and I cuddle on the porch swing awhile. And it could be mine, or at least possible, if a kiss stays a kiss and I don’t finish the Tradition by using the kiss to slurp out Reggie’s soul, leaving behind little more than a walking husk, all that cleverness gone. Anna and I always joke that it’s our annual “botox appointment,” but it doesn’t feel funny now, not when there’s a chance for lasagna and Scrabble and porch swings and –
Someone shouts, “Thirty seconds!”
Reggie looks at me expectantly.
“Sorry. What?”
“You going to kiss your wife?”
Anna glances over, entwined in the woman’s arms. And my wife knows me so well, she stiffens, reading my posture. Her gaze softens, eyes twinkling with regret for what we do, and she nods. We’re not monsters. Not always, anyway. The crowd begins counting down from ten.
I step closer to Reggie. “I think I’ll stay.”
He pulls me in and kisses me right as the crowd whoops “Zero!” and bottles of champagne pop around us. And tonight, a kiss just a kiss, I feel the youngest I’ve been in decades.
💻 Your turn: write microfiction!
Using the same prompts above (kissing at midnight/twinkle/the holidaze), write a story of your own! Give yourself 72 hours or less to write it, and remember: the goal isn’t perfection. It’s putting your pen (cursor) to the page (screen) and making some art.
When you’re ready to share it with me, reply to this email, post it directly in the comments, or have a soul-sucking witch whisper it in my ear. I want to read your gems!
(As always, if you’re feeling stuck getting started, here’s an article I wrote on microfiction fundamentals.)
🚢 Get your lifeboats ready this January!
We had quite a few goodies in the pipe this month, but one topic pulled ahead of the others. Put on your life vests, folks, because this month we’re talking about the mail carriers on the RMS Titanic! 🚢🚢🚢
Will I do all my research set to Celine Dion? 100%.
🌍 A creative year in review
I’m famously hard on myself as an artist, always looking ahead and thinking about what I’ve failed to do so far, instead of what I’ve accomplished. But I want to start this year doing the opposite - instead of looking at everything I’ve done, lemme tell y’all just how much I managed to do in 2024! As an artist, I…
Finished my debut novel, The Year We Got Away, and am querying it - so far with seven full requests under my belt! “The one” is coming soon :)
Got 50,000 words into a new novel
Drafted an outline for another novel
Wrote scripts for Pemberton County (and finished a stop motion animation!)
Wrote eleven pieces of microfiction for SMS and polished two longer short stories that are currently out on submission
Drew, painted, or embroidered seventy postcards for subscribers
Hosted two photo embroidery ateliers
Played music live with Rhody for a house show
Collaborated with Jessica Sundstrom and got our art on the cover of Photo Trouvée Magazine (!)
Spoke on my first panel at WorldCon
Judged literally over a thousand stories
Won a novel competition with Pulp Literature
Sculpted a mirror frame, a new lamp, and planters for the house, plus made a cool-ass rug and a cloud lamp - diving into home design as art
and published my first zine
Of course, I’ve also had truly countless agent and short story rejections, made a pretty big professional flub with my first year overseeing sponsors for NYC Midnight, ruined paintings, cried over creative work, misplaced art supplies, spilled perfectly good coffee (like today!), accidentally stepped into a bowl of yogurt (I couldn’t replicate it if I tried), broken a sculpture, been paralyzed by self doubt, played over 24 hours of Hogwarts Legacy in one week… all the little messy things that make for a bona fide dang life.
Here’s to 2025, my friends.
Do you have a resolution? Mine’s to master making bagels and old fashioneds. How about you?
All my love and New Years-Induced Heartburn,
Nikita, your Snail Mail Sweetheart