#8: Tiny fiction, redacted
Redacted memos, alternate dimensions, postcards!
Howdy, earthlings, interdimensional visitors, and whoever else loves snail mail!
This week has been chaos: Rhody and I are finishing up the move from our Airbnb and into our apartment. It still doesn’t feel real that we have a three-year lease in the south of France. I’ll wiggle my toes on the 70s tile and slurp an espresso, peering out the kitchen window at those red Toulousaine rooves stretching across the city and get giddy with my reality. Everything has been perfect, the move swimming along until…I sprained my ankle.
I’ve had my share of surgeries and illnesses lay me out, but I’ve been blessed by the Sprain Gods until now. It is comedically awful timing, but I’m trying my best (and playing lots of Sims, telling myself it’s educational since it’s in French). Oh, well. More time off my feet has meant more time to finalize my Patreon art project for the month - redacted files!
July’s art: a mysterious dossier
Yesterday I watched about an hour of the House Oversight Committee hearing on UAPs (that’s the new term for UFOs for reasons I’m not totally sure about - plz educate me in the comments). It was a wild hearing, y’all. Aliens are among us. Hopefully when I meet them, they love the stick-n-poke saucer my friend and artist I love Jess Drawhorn gave me Christmas 2015.
The hearing on aliens and classified documents is a happy synchronicity; all month long I’ve been writing and redacting files for my Patreon/paid Substack fam. If I do say so myself, they are dope. Each patron is receiving a dossier of four heavily redacted (and aged!), loosely connected files about interdimensional beings and the Voynich Manuscript1.
The files span 60 years and include a child’s report card, a doctor’s musings, a Publix incident report, and a private investigator’s findings. My favorite part was either hand-aging each page -
- or the overall redacting process. I tried to get into character as the redactor: what was I trying to obscure? What don’t I want folks to know - and why?
These pieces are a labor of love and are going out in a few days with a small note connecting my patrons directly to both the files and the city they’ll be mailed from, Toulouse.
I don’t think I’ve been so excited about a patron-driven project since I did these single-line drawings a few months back:
If you want the dossier, now’s a good time to upgrade here for a one-time artwork, or subscribe to Patreon for some quarterly/monthly art! Just send me a message specifying you want the dossier, not whatever I cook up for August.
The votes are in
Patrons and subscribers voted for this month’s postcard-fiction prompt:
Action: using a metal detector
Word: shimmer
Those words fit together almost too well, so I did my best to pivot out of comfortable territory. Thanks be to Dog, I was already elbows deep in my redacting project, so I kept the trend alive with my postcard fiction.
While last month’s story simply fit on a postcard, this month’s was written like it was a letter scribbled onto a postcard.
As a writer. I don’t usually opt for the epistolary form; it limits your sense of immediacy, and there’s only one character, the writer. But this was so fun. Just like the redacted documents, it dished up a great opportunity to study character voice! While writing this postcard story, I even considered how the character might physically press the pen onto the postcard, and how much (or little) they’d care for tidiness. In a way, it blurred the line between actor and writer, taking me back to my high school drama club days.
The story: wormholes at the gas station
Here’s the postcard I wrote on:
And here’s the story I wrote on the back:
The character wrote a little chaotically - but given the circumstances, I would too. Here’s the transcription:
Izzy,
I’m sorry, you were right. Leandro’s been gone since we tried to find you Tuesday, and so I took his metal detector to the busted-out Sinclair on XXXXXX + you were fucking right; shit’s brewing under the linoleum, same shit we found in the XXXXXXX Parking lot the night it gobbled you first.
Maybe you think I’m a dumbass, but I just miss you both so bad. It’s like I’m dead already. The metal detector went apeshit in front of the old beer cave, so that’s where I started cutting.
The linoleum peeled up stupid easy, and under it was that same XXXXXX shimmer that took you both.
Naturally (you know me) I chickened the fuck out. Now I’m writing you in the XXXXX, drinking our emergency tequila. I’d say this counts, cuz either you two are waiting on the other side of the slick, or it killed you. Either way, I know what’s coming is gonna hurt like hell.
I love you both.
Write a story yourself
Now it’s your turn, bbs! Write a postcard-sized story that follows the prompt (action: using a metal detector; word: shimmer) and share it here.
Your story can be as short as five words or as long as you want, so long as it fits on a postcard!2 To take the pressure off, I trace my postcard onto scrap paper and draft the story there, so I know how much room I have to work with. Generally, I do four or five drafts before transcribing the final one onto the postcard itself.
Challenge yourself with a time limit - I gave myself 24 hours to write this and am content with it, all things considered. Try 24 hours, 48 hours, or a whole week. In my opinion, setting a time limit keeps you from overworking a fun lil exercise.
To strengthen those storytelling chops, I’ll leave you with this last chickie nug of advice: subscribe to my favorite Substack of all time, Mickey Fisher’s Extant Storytech R&D Report. He embeds so much wisdom into each article, and particularly highlights the power of brevity and character voice - two essential elements of microfiction.
Hop to it, friends, and share your story with me by replying to this email directly, or pop ‘em in the comments!
And as always, help this hopeful bean (me, I am the hopeful bean) grow their newsletter. If you liked the story and the dossier, share Snail Mail Sweethearts with a friend.
All my redacted love forever,
Nikita, your Snail Mail Sweetheart <3
Here’s the TL;DR on the Voynich Manuscript: in 1913, a rare book dealer named Voynich rediscovered and popularized this book that’s carbon-dated to the mid-15th century. It’s written in a language no one can decipher and filled with drawings of plants and constellations that do not exist. Aliens? 100% aliens.
If you’re feeling stumped re: getting started, this is an article I wrote for NYC Midnight about the basics of microfiction.