prompt: star, title: the daily stumble in misc. flash fiction

It could be better, it could be worse for Jemma Taylor, M.F.A. While most of her old grad-school comrades slave away as untenured adjunct professors, she fell into writing a gimmicky series of paperbacks called “The Morning Jumble Mysteries” with such hackneyed titles as “Welcome To The Jumble” “It’s A Jumble Out There” and “The Jumble Bee Sting”. The publishing house sees an undue cut of the profits, as the first one was tossed off on a lark so she didn’t think to properly negotiate, but as long as she keeps steadily churning out doggerel, she makes a quite-comfortable living, while old colleagues are still up to their tits in student loans.

But it leaves her manufacturing predictable ephemera she has no interest in, her serious writing rejected but everyone but a small group of fringe-artist friends and the occasional trust-fund guy or gal trying to get in her pants. She’s so ashamed of her work, she lies to her landlord she makes her living as a soft-core porn streamer, instead of admitting to writing piffles. She couldn’t claim her “fame” even if she wanted to, as the publisher hired a series of elderly actresses to star as her pen name “Muriel Pennywhistle” at trade shows even though Jemma’s just in her early thirties!

Well… middle-thirties. “Semantics.” She’d say.

She did retain a large financial stake in, if not creative control over, adaptational rights and as the second-rate streaming service Bingr sniffs around the properties, if all goes to plans, she can cash out and leave the series to ghostwriters who’d kill their own grandmas to make half what she did.

Things start getting weird for Ms. Taylor once word of lucrative options get around, soon weird calls and e-mails start, break-ins to her digital files, vague threats scaring off lukewarm lovers and true friends alike, all the while leaving her clues to the crimes in the forms of the jumble puzzles, just like in her godawful books. The evidence always seems to lack heft upon outside analysis, leaving her to wonder, what the hell’s going on. Is it her publisher looking to scare her off her cut of the pie? Bingr’s executives looking for a better deal? One of the Muriel actresses, Scarlett Hennig or Althea Butler? (God, Jemma hopes those are just their stage names.) Has she magically stumbled into her own world of clichés? Is she going mad? Is she going some double secret insane, subconsciously wrecking her career so she can stop writing mass-market trash, no longer trapped in the Catch-22 of making good bank but only from regrettable forgettable crap?

It could be better for Jemma and worse too though how much worse it could get looks less and less the day. So, she’s left to solve the more tired old chestnut of all, the tortured artist trapped inside unfulfilling success, just wishing someone or something could show up like the sudden ending of some bad paperback novel and put her out of her mystery.

Last updated August 12, 2020