Short, but not all that short

So, for the last fortnight I've been working on two separate short stories, getting them ready for subbing. Much of this consisted of beating them with a big stick until all the adverbs fell off, because both were well over the max wordcounts allowable for their respective anthologies -10K in each case. (My natural wordcount for a short is actually about 7K, but both of these stories included lots of paranormal stuff and plot.)

Still, this should please the dingbat  reader who gave Dark Enchantment a 1-star Amazon review simply because she doesn't like short stories.

Honestly, there are days when I wonder why the hell I bother.

One of the two stories wasn't erotica - it was a Cthulhu-mythos horror tale I'd been sitting on for a few years. It needs to be published. You know how sometimes (maybe only once in your lifetime) you write something and you know it's better than anything you could actually do, and you think "Where the heck did that come from?!" Well, The Play's the Thing is one of those. I'm desperately hoping this one will please the dream editor and end up in his dream anthology.

The other story was the romance thingie I was worrying about a while back. I think I made the romance work. It also turned out to have just about everything I knew about Viking magic shoehorned into the plot, which gave me a headache...  I do do these things to myself, don't I? Anyway, it's off and begging for acceptance and all I can do is cross my fingers.

And buckle down to the next deadline.