#71: Ana gets her petty revenge
Microfiction, mailable art, and monthly creative news.
Welcome to May!
Last month, Eastercon in Belfast introduced me to so many incredible people. After a whirlwind of talking on panels (including moderating my first one!), pints and endless coffees with new friends (like the raddest podcasting angels at Strange Horizons), and devouring history with Rhody at the Titanic Experience museum, I came back to Toulouse invigorated and ready to tackle my own projects again/prioritize the future of my career.
And that includes this month’s writing and art! Today we’ll…
💌 peep my typewriter portraits of Princess Diana,
💌 find out the voting results for this month’s prompt,
💌 read some salty fiction about rich excess,
💌 and hear some monthly creative news.
💾 A month in postcard art
Folks, when you’re presented with a real crappy member of the royal family for the month’s postcard art, it puts you in a tough spot. Even if there are some fascinating photos of Wallis and Edward VIII, do I want to draw pictures of Nazi sympathizers? And do my patrons even want those in their home?
Not really. So instead, I picked everyone’s favorite royal, the woman who devoted her too-short life to banning landmines, destigmatizing HIV/AIDS at the height of the crisis, funding cancer research, and helping combat homelessness: Princess Diana.
I found a book from 1981 on typewriter portraits1, many of which feature the royal family. but for my patrons, I focused on Princess Diana - over and over and over. In the photo the typewriter image below is based on, she’d only have been twenty, freshly married to Charles.
These are such a blast to make - most likely because I got to binge the mystery/speculative podcast The Secret of St. Kilda while I did - what a ride! And a surefire way to forget that time is passing.
🗳 The votes are in
Patrons and full-access subscribers voted for this month’s postcard-fiction prompt:
Action: spinning in a circle
Word: fuddy duddy
Inspiration: King Edward VIII’s abdication from the throne
In case you missed it, here’s everything you need to know about Edward VIII:
Each month after voting closes, I give myself a measly 48 hours to write you a story set in whatever slice of history we explored.
Y’all made it hard for me with fuddy duddy and spinning in a circle, but I think I wrangled something out all the same.
🛌 Ana and her sister deserve nice things, too
Here’s the postcard I wrote on:
And here’s the story:
In each of the home’s five bedrooms, beds float like sad life rafts on seas of carpet. Ana’s apartment can fit in their ex-highnesses’ master bedroom. Twice.
The abdicated king’s a real bastard, what with the way that fuddy duddy boasts to dirty traitors over cigarettes. She empties the butts from his bedside ashtray and strips his half of the bed, moving to Wallis’ side to do the same. You ask her, that woman’s just as rotten, glittering eyes calculating his highness’ social calls with Nazi types, never saying a peep.
Is Ana any better, though, merrily scrubbing the stains from their underwear in exchange for a week’s wages? When her sister moved to Berlin in ‘32, she said the salons and parties – where she could finally dress how she felt on the inside – brought her to life for the first time. But once the book burnings began, she fled home to Portugal. Now her sister’s hiding in suits and cropped hair and “senhor,” pretending she never used to swish her skirts in German dance halls.
Ana balls up the sheets and lugs them to the laundry room, abandoning the pile by her purse near the washbasin. It could wait. Instead, Ana opens the linen cupboard. Embroidered sheets, dozens of pillowcases in pastel hues with floral trims, and white embroidery on white linen crowd the shelves. Too much, even with five beds.
Ana herself owns two pillowcases, one with a cigarette burn from its previous owner. Her sister sleeps in a boarding house, no decorations of her own.
Well. Ana shoves her arm between the sheets to the back of the closet, drawing out an embroidered pillowcase, cold and wrinkled with disuse but still so soft it practically faints in her hands. Sniffing it – no mildew, good – Ana stashes the pillowcase in the bottom of her purse, then returns to work, making up the beds and washing Edward and Wallis’ dirty sheets.
When Ana gets home, she slips the pillowcase onto her ratty pillow and holds it close, spinning around her studio, pressing the soft cloth to her cheek. Tomorrow, she’ll ship it to her sister. But tonight? Ana sleeps the best she has since the war began.
💻 Your turn: write microfiction!
Using the same prompts above (spinning in a circle/fuddy duddy/the abdication of Edward VIII), write a story of your own! Give yourself 48 hours or less to write it, keep it short, 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 give it to my rabbits to eat and see what happens. Reading your work is the highlight of my month!
(As always, if you’re feeling stuck getting started, here’s an article I wrote on microfiction fundamentals.)
📝 Personal letters, translated
For April’s voting, subscribers were split between two topics, but at the last moment one pulled ahead and set the tone:
✉️ Cher Monsieur Caubet: the bundle of WWI letters I bought from a Toulouse flea market ✉️
We’ll see how my French stands up - and if I can dig up some real history from around here!
(Note - to everyone who voted for Annie Oakley : she lost by one vote! It was very close; I’ll put her up next month because I’d love to write about her letter to President McKinley too!)
🌍 Updates in my creative world
I’m nearly finished with draft one of a wild west fantasy novel. I first got the idea at WorldCon last September, and now since EasterCon I’ve been motivated to take it the rest of the way and crank draft one out. Should be done in the next week, folks!
Speaking of EasterCon, I led two creative workshops: photo embroidery and erasure poetry! The participants were lovely and enthusiastic and everything you could hope for in a group of crafters and artists - and I’m loving the art I made there:
I spoke on three panels about writing/an artist’s identity, and moderated my first one! That was surprisingly fun, possibly because it meant my job was ensuring our Twin Peaks panel stayed on task.
And finally, I’ve chipped away here and there at my latest oil painting - not as much as I’d like, but given all the travel and chaos, I’m pretty happy with having worked on it at all.
If this newsletter inspired you, make some art and send me a picture of it/send me your story! I always want to witness what you’ve put in the world.
All my love and stolen pillowcases forever,
Nikita, your Snail Mail Sweetheart
The book is called Bob Neill’s Book of Typewriter Art.