I just finished a new short story and I’ve decided to call it “In Love With Love.”

It’s very short (for me), weighing in at about 3,500 words.  It’s about a woman named Catherine who’s seeing a therapist because she doesn’t know how to love her son.

This one has a very weird story behind it.

I have a strange sleeping arrangement on Thursday nights/Friday mornings: I go to bed at midnight, and my friend Victor calls me at 3 AM on Friday so I can work on my webcomic and we can talk.  (Obviously he’s a night owl, like me.)  This past Friday, he woke me up with his phone call as usual, and I had been chatting to him for a couple of hours before I needed to go look at something relevant on the computer.  I switched the screen on and there was a Word document open on the screen.

It was five pages’ worth of a short story that I’d written sometime between going to bed at midnight and getting up at 3.  And until I saw it there, I hadn’t realized I’d actually done that; I’d had a vague recollection that I’d just been writing something when the phone rang, but I’d assumed it was a dream.  With some surprise, I told Victor that I’d written part of a short story sometime between going to bed and getting up.

He laughed and said he wanted to see it immediately, with no editing, because he wanted to see what kind of mind-blowingly ridiculous thing I must have written in my sleep.  So I sent it to him as an attachment without reading it over, unsure of what exactly I was even sending.  Later that morning, after he’d read it and I was already at work, he e-mailed me and acknowledged that not only did the story make sense; it was a good beginning in his opinion.  (And, not so surprisingly, it was completely free of spelling errors, and everything in it made sense.)

I went ahead and finished the story over the last couple days.  I don’t know if it’s really one of my best, but it’s pretty good for something I began while half asleep.  I guess I’ll go try to find a home for it next.