I moved a few pages around, and named my setting with its superpowers! I had to weasel-word a bit. For those that don’t know? Marvel and DC have trademarks on the word Superhero, so you can’t put up a book which has that name on the cover or description without them nailing you to a wall. It sucks.
Anyway, I present to you: A Date Gone Awry
This is a short story approximately 5,000 words in length, about a male main character (shocking for me), who’s a somewhat reformed villain, and who is having a mid-life crisis so went looking on a dating site. Things don’t go as planned. And the town does NOT have a home anywhere. I tried to make it just vague enough to go almost anywhere.
Ancient Dreams 
This book has superhero right on the cover
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In which case, as soon as DC or Marvel notice, they’re going to sue the crap out of the person. Seriously, I looked it up earlier to be sure. They’ve got a joint trademark on the term.
Unless, of course, the author has licensed the term from them… but I honestly don’t know.
Edit: In essence, I don’t even want to take the risk of lawyers getting involved. They have the trademark, which makes it tough.
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Wait, seriously? The word ‘Superhero’ is trademarked? That just seems dumb.
Anyway, that aside, the short story was legit great fun, and I honestly would not mind reading more about Chris the anti-villain not-Batman. Which bodes well for Born a Queen, no?
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Yes, it is. I can’t find the actual trademark /page/ off-hand, but here’s an older FAQ about it: http://www.cbr.com/the-superhero-trademark-faq/
While looking, I also found an article from last year where DC and Marvel dropped their case against someone with a title of ‘Zero to Super Hero’ on a self-help book, seemingly because they realized they might lose. I’m still not going to risk things personally, but based on that I suspect that they’re going to lose the trademark in the relatively near future.
As to Chris, I had some fun with him. I usually have a really, really hard time coming up with plots for short stories (novellas are about as short as my brain tends to work), and someone asked me if I’d do more with him. The answer to that is… very likely. But I’ve got a lot of stories to work through, so bear with me.
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