My Troll Lover

Sometimes I wish we lived in a world where you didn't have to be Stephen King or Neil Gaiman to get a short story collection published. Shorts come out of me like nobody's business. It took three days to write "My Troll Lover". Would have been two, but last night I left it with a lame ending, and that had to get fixed. Spin the penultimate scene like so, add a new last scene, and voila. The result made me feel all gooey inside -- a good kind of gooey. "My Troll Lover" is a sober meditation on sexual identity in the postmodern adolescent demimonde. Here's an excerpt: Mitzi Gaines and the rest of the Spirit crowd had started in on me as soon as the Ghost was out the door. “Troll tramp, troll tramp . . .” Yeah, on and on like that. Bitches. They kicked me off Varsity Cheer when I first began dating the Ghost. If he were Negro I could sue, Daddy said, but the law gave no protection to trans-species . . . relationships. And the way Daddy said that, I could almost hear it. You know what I’m talking about. Troll tramp, troll tramp . . . Proper girls don’t date trolls. We don’t touch them; we don’t kiss them; we certainly don’t allow them to rake their pointy triangular teeth through the frizz above our Holy of Holies. Okay, so it's really just a fluffy bit of mind candy about horny* kids. Fun to write, fun to read. I had to break away from The Brakan Correspondent because, honestly, my poor birdies are taking it in the tail right about now. I needed "My Troll Lover" to pull out of this funk. Steamy troll-foo is up at the BBS, if you're interested (Fantasy Challenge). Let me know what you think. Doug Hoffman

*Ah, puns. Toe jam of the humor pantheon. You gotta love 'em.