long short stories

I have a problem. It's incredibly hard for me to keep my short stories short. I had every intention of keeping this new one (Wish You Were Here) to 5500 words maximum, and now here it is sitting at a bloated 8000. That's such an undesirable length for a short story. Unsaleable really. I've tried selling pieces of similar length in the past, and typically get, "good, but too long, sorry."

Blah.

And so, now I have a few of these short stories of awkward length sitting on my hard drive. One piece of advice was to make them even longer, turning them into novellas. I tried that with one of them, blowing it up to 18000 words. In the end, it felt a little watered down.

I dunno. This one is the shortest of my awkwardly long short stories. I'll see what I can do to shave it down a little. At least get it down to the low 7000s.

Here's a screen capture of the completed first draft: