A story idea occurred to me today while taking the trash out and listening to the neighbor’s kids screaming while playing outside.

Fortunately, I can’t hear the kids’ screaming while I’m inside, but it reminded me starkly of the terrible experience I had living downstairs from a very loud family back when I lived in an apartment. They were incredibly inconsiderate and so catastrophically loud that my ceiling fan would BOUNCE because they were stomping and vibrating the floor (my ceiling) so much. I took videos and recordings of this (noting that they sometimes went until after 1 in the morning), and the apartment manager insisted that it “wasn’t against the rules” and “I can’t do anything because they pay rent.” (Literally what she said to me.) When I continued to complain and their final suggestion was that they could move ME to a different apartment, I said to hell with it and moved out of the apartment. Last thing I want to do is reward these people with more of my money. In my written statement of intent, I specified that the ONLY reason I was moving out was the noise disturbance; that I had tried to resolve it and they were not cooperative. I found out afterwards that they had entered my reason for leaving in their records as “resident is moving out to go back to school.” LITERALLY MADE UP A LIE so they wouldn’t have to say they were part of the problem.

It’s enough to make you wish you could set a curse on your neighbor. I guess.

I ended up writing a story in which a witch next door does just that.

For some reason my original conception of the story got away from me pretty quickly. I’d initially conceived it as two witches living next door to a loud family and each wanting to handle it differently, and having a philosophical disagreement about whether the family should be put under a curse or whether it’s better to just use magic to protect themselves from the noise. One witch thinks the family should be punished–that they should have consequences for their actions, and that it would be better for the world at large if these kids learn that their screaming affects other people, perhaps making them better people in the future. The other witch thinks it’s not up to them to bring that down upon them, and that punishing them with a curse now will teach them more about fearing witches than about learning to be kind.

I didn’t quite go that direction with the story, but a version of that philosophical disagreement did make it into the story. It’s just that it happens through text messages.

And the whole story happens through written correspondence.

It ended up being something pretty fun and special. I came up with community posts, handwritten door notes, text chats, forum posts, e-mail communications, and more to tell this weird little story of a witch’s curse and the fallout that comes from it–in a modern age where your angry neighbor might post about you on Nextdoor and you might have to go check your behavior on a witch version of “Am I the Asshole?”

It was fun and challenging to come up with different writing styles, chat aliases, forum signatures, profile pics, reactions, you name it. I wrote this thing in one day and more or less finalized its format over the next two days. It’s ready for beta readers, but because of the weird format, I don’t know how many options I’ll have for publication. We’ll see!