Short story isn't so short. Surprise!

In a post from late last year, I discussed starting a story and then abandoning it temporarily at 5,000 words, off to write another short story. (The short story that stole my attention ended up selling, too! That's the one that will be out next year.) But this week, the abandoned short story came back to haunt me, so I decided to come back to it. I finished it last night.

I think I'm going to title it "Heels Over Head." Not sure yet.

Here are all the cool things about it!

• It contains not one, not two, but THREE queer characters.
• All of those characters are lesser represented shades of the LGBTQ rainbow. (Because let's face it; when we talk about LGBTQ characters, it's pretty much 99% the L and the G.)
• It destroys the notion that stalking is a romantic thing to do.
• It destroys the notion that romantic relationships are ruled by a script.
• It's got some really excellent dialogue, if I do say so myself.
• A character with a late appearance in the story was kinda flat in my mind before showing up, and then promptly did something awesome to become rounded out.
• The antagonist/stalker, who does some pretty horribly manipulative and scary things in the story, is never called "crazy" or labeled as doing maladaptive things because of mental illness. (I'm not a fan of the idea that people "must be crazy" if they violate other people's boundaries, and therefore the environment that enabled them and encouraged them to act this way is never criticized.)

Here are a few things about it that I'm not so happy about:

• It ended up being over 10,000 words.
• There's some medical stuff that happens in it because there's an accident, and I don't know if I got it all right.
• Its "message" might be a bit too overt sometimes. Hard to tell whether my character would be this plainly spoken about it or whether it'd be better to leave it out and let the readers make their own conclusions.

It might be rough in places so I'll clean it up a little before offering it to the folks who said they wanted to test read. :)

Since it's long, I might be looking for an anthology to submit it to instead of a short story magazine. I'll be on the lookout when I get in a submission frame of mind. :)