Jenna’s Big Finish
By
Ginger Snatch
This is a work of fiction. The characters, locations, and events described in this story are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons or events is strictly coincidental. Real locations have been used fictitiously and details have been altered for the purpose of the story.
All the characters in this story are over 18 years of age.
No part of this story may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage and retrieval without the written consent of the author.
© 2020
Jenna’s Big Finish
By
Ginger Snatch
Chapter 1
It was fall of my senior year and I was majoring in English and creative writing and busting my ass to get a scholarship so I could go on for a Masters. I’d sent out applications to six colleges already, but I had to admit that four of them were basically Plan B.
My seminar was a narrative fiction class of twelve students. Most of us were writing a novel, but a few were producing a series of related short stories. We met every Tuesday and Friday from one to four (insane!) so six people could read their work and the others could “critique” it. That’s academic-speak for “tear the shit out of it.”
Peer evaluation is all the craze, and it’s mostly useless. I’ve learned that the hard way. Nobody really listens to your stuff. They listen until they find something they would do differently or don’t like, and that’s it. They wait their turn with the axe. And then they get payback. It’s a miracle anyone stays in classes like that beyond about the third week.
It was even worse for me because I was working on an erotic novel about a young wife who is discovering her hidden sexual desires. All the guys in the class (seven, and I’m sure three of them were gay) called it “frustrated housewife porn” or “jerk-off journal shit.” The other women in the class didn’t want to sit near me because they were afraid some of the slime would rub off.
James Ripton, the instructor, knew his stuff and tried to run the class well and had good ideas, given that I don’t believe you can teach anyone to write beyond a certain level. You can teach people grammar and punctuation and vocabulary, and that’s supposed to happen in grade school. Creativity is there or it isn’t, and you can’t do much about that.
“Jim,” as he wanted us to call him, tried to give us a process, and he said right up front that no two people write the same way, so some of what he gave us might be useless and we could ignore it if it didn’t help. I gave him props for that.
The one problem was that he wanted an outline of our work to start the second week. I understood that he wanted that so everyone had a context for judging the work. He said it was a good way to recognize potential problems early on, too, and I got that. But I write from my gut, and I usually don’t know what’s going to come out from day to day except that most of it will get rewritten later. It’s like walking from New England to California. You only get a few miles every day, but if you aim generally west, you’ll get there eventually. You won’t know exactly where for quite a while.
The third week of the course, Stephanie—her last name was Queen, and we couldn’t help mentioning the irony—read her work in progress, and I felt like I was having my teeth drilled without Novocain. I wondered how I could say that without actually using the words.
“Interesting,” Jim said. He was a hunk who had the misfortune to publish a novel at twenty-five that was nominated for about eight awards, but didn’t win any of them. I’d read it and liked it in spite of myself. I thought it didn’t win because all the women were either bitches, idiots, or weaklings.
“Who has an observation they’d like to share?” That was Jim’s euphemism. I raised my hand.
“Ms. Hastings?”
I was pretty sure he knew all our names but he kept it formal, maybe to put some distance on it when we tore each other apart.
“Well,” I said. “I like the premise a lot. But I’m not sure the character’s voice fits her mood or the feeling I think she’s trying to convey.”
“Um,” Jim said. A few people around them furrowed their brows and tried to look “writerly.” Stephanie’s eyes flashed like she was already planning what she’d say about me.
“Can you be a little more specific or concrete?”
I could, and I fought for a tactful way to say that Stephanie’s prose reminded me of a cement truck dropping its wet heavy load on crushed gravel.
“Well, I got the feeling that the protagonist, who is the narrator is fragile. Or at least that we’re supposed to perceive her that way. But her vocabulary is more…um, aggressive, maybe?”
Jim nodded and frowned. “Verbs, maybe?”
OK, he understood where I was going.
“A lot of her verbs are strong and violent. I know we’ve often been told the active voice is stronger, but I wonder if maybe a few passives would have made her sound less…assertive. And maybe some…I’m not sure…maybe a euphemism here or there instead of the images?”
“Interesting,” Jim said again.
“I don’t see that at all.” Deirdre said. She wore her hair in a buzz cut so her head resembled a fuzzy doorknob. Too bad, because she had big brown eyes that looked huge without hair to distract from them.
“I thought the whole point of the story was the deceptiveness of appearance and that we have to look beneath the surface. The stronger voice is the clue that shows us the narrator is unreliable.”
Jim raised his eyebrows and didn’t say anything. I’d learned that meant he was encouraging Deirdre to step over a line.
Two or three other people joined her and seemed to agree without saying so. Then Tristan, one of the few guys in the class I thought wrote better than I did, said what I’d been dancing around.
“Actually,” he said, “I wonder if the rhythm is appropriate for the impression the character is trying to convey. It’s very strong, almost masculine, but not really smooth.”
“How do you mean, Mr. Roche?”
Tristan took a deep breath. “The short sentences and few modifiers were very masculine, almost a Hemingway parody. But they didn’t flow well. The voice might have drawn us in more effectively if it had more…lyricism. I hate the word, but that’s what I thought. I kept paying attention to the sound and the rhythms more than I did to the actually content. And that was a problem.”
Stephanie’s face turned a washed-out pink. She was a pastel blonde anyway, pale hair, pale blue eyes, pale complexion. And she wore pastels so she looked even more faded in the room.
“I think that’s what I was trying to say,” I said. “But I think Tristan’s put it more concretely.”
And more tactfully. Stephanie wrote like a bricklayer.
Jim moved us on to the next reader. And the next. Nobody wrote anything really bad, but nothing really caught my attention, either.
I read my pages, and Stephanie’s hand was up before I put down the last page. Jim nodded to her.
“The character is so over the top,” she said. “She’s a cartoon, and I can’t believe her or her actions. That makes it impossible to take the subject matter seriously.”
I knew better than to respond. Two of the other women in the class agreed. Then one of the boys I suspected of still sleeping with dolls.
Jim looked around the room and nobody else seemed to have a response. I raised my hand.
“Ms. Hastings?”
I looked around the room with my face as open and neutral as I could make it.
“Has anyone read Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal?’” I asked. “Where he advocates eating Irish babies to
cure the famine?”
About half the class nodded, but nobody looked encouraging.
“OK,” I said. “Just wondering.”
The class ended half an hour later and we picked up our laptops, printouts, bookbags, briefcases or whatever other implements of mass instruction we’d brought. I typed a text to myself on my phone, the idea that had come to me for my next chapter during the discussion. Stephanie drew herself up to her full height and swung her bony ass past my face on her way out. Bitch.
When everyone else was out, I walked up to Jim. His forehead had beads of sweat and his eyes looked tired.
“Jim, Mr. Ripton,” I said. “Do you have a few minutes?”
“Sure.” He slid his own notes into his briefcase and I took a deep breath. He’s a little over six feet, and my eyes are even with his Adam’s apple. He’s about twice as broad as I am, too. He looks more like an actor or athlete than a writer.
“Well, you probably know that I’m hoping to go on for an MFA after I graduate here. I have five or six applications in the works, but I was hoping you could give me a recommendation.”
He looked at me. “I haven’t taken a poll, Ms. Hastings, but probably everyone in this seminar is going on for an MFA.”
I nodded. “Yes. Probably. But I’m hoping you won’t give all of us a recommendation because that would lower your credibility. And I like to think I’m a decent writer. I’m getting a lot out of your class, and I’d like to get even more.”
He rolled his eyes. “The only way people get a lot out of the class is listen to the backstabbing and nonsense, then ignore ninety-five percent of it. The best way to learn is find someone who’s making the same mistakes you are and learning from them.”
“Is that how you produced Penumbra Avenue?” I asked. “I can’t imagine you found anyone who wrote enough like you that you could learn from your mistakes.”
His eyes flickered for a second.
“You are a decent writer, Ms. Hastings. You may have the best ear in the class. Your structure gets a little…loose…at times.”
“I flail,” I said. “I know. I hate outlining. I’m a pantser, not a plotter. That’s just me.”
He nodded. “Me too. But outlines make life easier in a situation like this.”
“I know.” I took a deep breath. “Jim, I know you like some of my work, and I know there are other good writers here, but I’d really appreciate being able to put your name on my applications.”
He held the door for me and our footsteps echoed down the hall, him in scuffed loafers and me in equally worn sneakers. He was tall and dark and I was petite but with hair almost the same dark brown. And longer. And my ass had more curves. Stephanie didn’t wear a bra when we came to this class, but she didn’t really need one, so it didn’t make any impression. I need one and I wore one. I won’t stoop to her level. Depth. Whatever.
“You know what you might consider,” Jim said as we reached the down staircase. “We’re having a guest speaker in a few weeks. I’m sure you know.”
“Allison Thrasher,” I said. “I’ve read all her books. I love them.”
Allison Thrasher was only about James Ripton’s age, and her first novel was a very sexy story of an abused woman that won or was nominated for several major awards. It was more literary than not, but it had me moaning under my covers and touching myself when I was in my teens. Seeing how she could arouse me—and thousands of other women—with the written word was one of the main reasons I wanted to write, too. Her later work was still hot, and even more daring, and she’d been short-listed for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Jim nodded. “Allison and I knew each other at Columbia. If you like, I can ask her to look at some of your work. If she likes it, maybe she would give you a recommendation.”
My heart almost stopped beating at the thought, then my face got warm and everything speeded up like I had a gerbil on a wheel in my chest.
“Columbia,” I said. “That’s the top of my list.”
“An excellent choice,” he said. “Do you have anything ready you’d like me to show her? A chapter, a short story? Anything long enough to give her a sense of your flavor?”
I nodded, too breathless to speak until I swallowed a few times.
“You’d really do that?”
“You are a good writer, Jenna. I don’t know if you’re really the best in the class right now, but you have enormous promise, and that may be even more important.”
He’d never called me by my first name before. I floated back to the dorm and opened up all my old flash drives and files to find fifteen or twenty pages that I thought revealed the real me.
That night, I dug into my books and found my well-thumbed copy Allison Thrasher’s first novel, and read the hot part again while my roommate slept. I found myself even more aroused than when I was fifteen, and I rubbed myself to another orgasm.
Chapter 2
The following Tuesday, I followed Jim back to his office after class and handed him a thumb drive with four word files on it.
“Two of these are short stories,” I told him, “one from last year and one that I actually sent out a few places that got rejected. And the others are chapters from a novel I was working on before I got blocked.”
I looked at the flash drive again. “I think it needs something big, and I just couldn’t see how to get there. I really want a to finish with a big bang.”
“Don’t we all?” Jim’s face was innocent, but my panties warmed up.
“The novel might be worth showing her,” he said. “Especially if you have an outline or synopsis.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know I hate outlines. And a synopsis is even harder for me.”
“But if you see that you need a different denouement, that means you do inherently understand structure, whether you like to outline or not. That’s a good sign.”
He cleared his throat.
“If it makes you feel any better, Allison doesn’t outline either. At least, she didn’t when we were in classes together. Maybe she does now for her publisher.”
He copied all four files to his own PC and gave me back the thumb drive.
“I’ll skim these over the next couple of days. Come up with a five-page outline for the novel by Friday, and if you can give me something solid enough, maybe it’ll be worth sending along to her.”
“You have her email?” My eyes widened. He actually went to school with Allison Thrasher.
He cleared his throat and looked toward the window and I thought his face picked up a little more color. “We were in a lot of classes together in grad school. But her first novel took off, and mine didn’t, and we drifted apart.”
“That’s so…”
“Yeah, romantic and all that.” He frowned at his monitor. “The point is we understood each other’s tastes and minds enough so if I tell her I think you’re worth looking at, she’ll do it.”
“I don’t know how I can thank you for this, Mr. Ripton. Jim.”
Actually, I had a pretty good idea, and my little girl parts were heating up, but his office was a bad place to do it. Someone could walk in any time, and finding me with his cock in my mouth would probably fuck up more than my GPA.
He cocked an eyebrow at me like he was thinking the same thing, so I got out of there before I did something really stupid. By the time I reached my dorm, my panties were sticky.
Over the next two days, I struggled to put together an outline based on what I’d written and where I thought the book was going before I hit the wall. As I looked at it again, I saw mistakes I’d made that might be part of the reason I was blocked. Maybe there were different choices that I should go back and change. I put those in, too, in bold font so they stood out.
Thursday night, I put the file together and copied it back to my thumb drive. Then I went into my faculty directory and emailed everything to Jim at his office. He’d see it before class, and maybe even have time to look at it.
I have to confes
s, I’d known his email since the first day of class when he made sure we all had it. He pointed out that if we became writers, most of our work would probably be online, so we should get used to it if we weren’t already. But I loved how I felt when I could look at him and see him look at me, and listen to me. And I could think about bending over his desk and him pulling down my panties and…
Allison Thrasher’s novels were hot and sexy and pretty explicit, and maybe she was why I was now fooling with borderline erotica. Maybe not. All I knew what that when I closed my eyes and put two people together, or maybe even three, I could keep going for pages. I was sure there were people in my seminar who thought I was writing either my biography or my high school fantasies, but fuck them. I was really trying to explore possibilities and personal choices that I hadn’t made.
Isn’t that what writing is all about?
What would James Ripton be like and where would he be now if his first novel had been as successful as Allison Thrasher’s? I found it on Amazon, sales rank four million plus, a used hardcover for a dollar, and looked at the blurb and info. The book was published nine years before, only months before Allison Thrasher’s first novel burned up the best-seller lists.
And now he was a good teacher at a little liberal arts college nobody ever heard of, and she was in People Magazine and on morning TV talk shows, and millions of people, maybe all over the world, recognized her face. And she was coming to our little college. I would have to ask Jim if he was the one who made that happen.
Friday, the class was the usual slash and burn party, but I didn’t have to read that day, and I tried to maintain a low profile as much as I could. Jim made all of us comment on most of the work, so I couldn’t disappear entirely, but none of the excerpts I heard struck sparks either way. I didn’t love anything, but I didn’t hate anything either. I was tempted to mention that and see if it generated any discussion, but I didn’t even care enough. All that mattered to me now was getting my own stuff ready to show Allison Thrasher. The idea that she might read some of my work both thrilled me and terrified me.
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