The Girl Who Chose Her Own Endings... was it murder by fan-fiction? Short story.

Who in their right mind would do such a thing? ‘Someone, like me,’ she told herself. ‘Driven to breaking point by rejection.’ Rejection, relentlessly dished out, could do terrible things to a young writer. At least it had to her. Which is how she came to be sitting opposite Sheridan Bradley on a tourist antique steam-train ride, jumping into his wood-lined compartment at the last second so they could be together.

“What are you doing?” he said. His silver-templed head was rocking. Maybe it was the train’s movements, but more likely the sight of the gun in her one hand and a paperback in her other. His paperback. His latest. She smiled at her captive, the youngish, best-selling author whose face glared handsomely out from the backs of book covers. A living success story and she had him all to herself. “This is not a desperate move to get your autograph, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said. “I’ve already got that.” She flipped open the paperback to the front, showing the flourish of his author’s scrawl. “Remember me in the queue at your book signing, the girl with huge dark glasses?” She half-hoped to see a glimmer replace the startled eyes. “No, of course you don’t.” Instead, she got that ‘oh god, a fan’ look that crept over the faces of famous people. “You have my book,” he said. “Yes. But I’m not a fan reader.” “Apparently.” “I’m a fan fiction writer.” That information gave him something to work with. He used it to try to defuse the situation. “No shame about that. All writers start out by writing somebody else. Even I did.” “Please don’t patronise me.” She twitched the barrel as a warning. “Just listen to the train instead,” she said. “The lovely bygone sound of a steam locomotive gaining speed. Hear its breathless scurry? Like the rapid scribble of a giant metal nib scratching over parchment, penning its way along the lines. Is it writing your death warrant? You see, I can write. But chance didn’t decide to blow its warm breath of success down my neck as it did to you.” “Ah.” Ah? Was that an ‘ah’ as in ‘so you’re a crazy failed writer?’ Or maybe, ‘Ah, not bad writing... why didn’t I think of those words about the scribbling steam train?’ It didn’t matter. Just more wasted scintillation on her part. She always shone when it didn’t matter and there was no risk of appreciation or, god forbid, actual praise. That’s the way life rolled for her. Like this tourist steam train ride. Movement, momentum, but ultimately destined to go nowhere. A twenty kilometer stretch of circular track in the mountains, passing through a length of darkness, a tunnel, then back again where it started. Then ‘Ride Over’. Sheridan Bradley was probably researching tourist steam trains for his next best seller. He might even be tempted to steal her words, she thought. If she let him. “Funny thing, chance,” she said glancing out of the window at a mountain rock face sliding by. “Not the lucky charm variety - lucky rabbits’ feet, lucky shoes, clothes, favourable days of the week, games of chance... I mean something more serious, and mysterious, a secret wheel that turns the universe, a shadow law behind all laws, the great invariable variable. Even God is a product of it. Think about it. If nobody created God and he always just existed, then he’s the ultimate example of chance. And so is faith. We do not choose, but are chosen, we are told. How is that for chance? Salvation, our eternal life... matters of chance. All is chance. It makes failure hurt even more somehow. It’s all so unfair.” “... this is an unexpected journey,” he said. “Look, you’re obviously a thinking person,” he said. “Thinking doesn’t stop me being crazy. It made me so. Do you know how many rejections I’ve had? How many books I’ve had killed off by publishers and sent back to me with rejection slips attached like toe tags? For me, opening my post office letter box each day was like opening a mortuary tray in a morgue.” “You have good words in you.” “That’s not what publishers said. ‘Obviously has some ability, but the writing is pastiche and derivative... the story has too many cliche elements...’ Publishers kept telling me stuff like that. Laughable. They’re clichéd elements because they’re ingredients in every best seller, including yours. But I wasn’t allowed to use them. Only best-selling authors are. Did fate wave a magic wand of acceptance over you? You could spill random words from a Scrabble board-game onto the floor and they’d be picked up and turned into a movie. But not me. My writing was like playing a game of tennis against a brick wall of fate. No matter what I wrote, whatever angle I tried, the ball just kept zooming back at me faster each time.” She was mixing her metaphors, but she had a captive audience. “A confession,” he said. “We all get rejections, even best selling authors, surprising as that may be to readers, and yes, it always hurts.” We. Inclusive. He was being collegiate. Could Stockholm Syndrome kick in so fast? Pity this wasn’t a longer journey, she thought. By the end of it he’d be so bonded with his captor he’d be volunteering to co-author a book series with her. Imagine that, she thought. Sheridan Bradley’s name with hers on a book cover. But right now she needed to concentrate on being with him on a train as the clicking-clock sound of metallic wheels going over the track joints counted down the time they had left together. “What happens now?” he said. “We reach a tunnel, eventually. There’ll be a roar as we thunder inside so nobody will hear anything.” “Look, maybe your problem isn’t with me, or publishers. It’s with life.” “Very perceptive. I’ve had rejection all my life, by family, by lovers, by colleagues and bosses, by publishers, but most galling of all by authors who should know better and be a little more understanding to unlucky members of their tribe.” Now he frowned. “Did I happen to do something once that upset you?” “No, you did nothing. Exactly nothing. I sent you my fan fiction manuscript, a version of your book with my new suggested ending on it. You ignored me.” “Sorry. You know how it is with people sending you their stuff. Copyright risks...” “Did you even read it?” “I may have. Tell it to me again.” “You’re playing with me, hoping I’ll get so locked into my own narrative and so flattered to have an audience’s rapt attention I won’t want to end it with this.” He eyed the gun. “Why would you even want to?” “I’ve got this thing about endings. Loved choose your own adventures as a kid and it went from there. I attended heaps of writing classes in my younger days. It didn’t change my rejection rate. One of my writing teachers said to me ‘if you read a book or see a movie and imagine a story going one way but then you are disappointed when it ends another way - maybe that’s your creative cue. How would your story go?’ It clicked with me. That ‘idea starter’ advice led to my becoming an avid story finisher... a fan writer who chooses her own endings. I re-write story wrongs... like yours.” “What wrongs?” “You killed off your character. Wrongs need to be righted... or rewritten.” “And how is this going to make you a successful fiction writer? Look, put that thing down. I’ll help you, give you any writing advice I can.” “Nice try. Shall we talk about cliché story structure? We’re like two boxing opponents facing off in the ring, feinting, jabbing, trying to find an opening...” “A thought occurs to me,” he said, switching points on the conversation and heading down a new track. “Somebody has put you up to this. This is a plan to jolt me into resurrecting my character. Who sent you? My publisher, worried I’ve killed off the golden goose? My ex-wife, worried about her royalty shares from my past books dwindling with the death of my hero.” “And now comes the complication phase of the story,” she said. “Bringing in new elements. But you’re complicating things unnecessarily. This is what it is.” “Just a grudge.” “Yes. One rejection too many has unhinged me. What will you try next? A desperate dive across the carriage? It may work in fiction, but in reality I’d see your muscles loading as they are now and I can fire much quicker than you can jump.” She saw his shoulders ease. “Listen, you’re preoccupied with endings,” he said. “But think for a moment, what about your own ending? Do you really want to end up being condemned to a lifetime in prison?” “I’m already condemned to a lifetime of failure. But maybe through this I can at least escape obscurity.” “Fame isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.” “Neither is failure. It’s not humbling, it’s not character building. It’s destroying. Failure is very overrated.” They fell silent. The creaking, the clicking and the panting of the steam engine filled the spaces. She could hear his thriller-author’s brain clicking like the wheels over the rail joints. “Maybe your writing needs more inspiration, a top writing course” he said. “Or travel, a stay in Paris. I’ll transfer some money into your account right now on my iPad. Just consider it a writer’s grant.” “Granted under a gun.” “What do you say?” “I say no thanks. I don’t want to take away your money. I want to take away your success.” “You made an allusion to god. Are you a believer?” “In the Great Hypothetical Being. Yes, I can easily see god as a writer who doesn’t mind throwing in disasters and surprise deaths to keep the story interesting.” “How do you think he would judge your actions - threatening someone’s life?” “He threatens lives all the time. And I think I have his attention. As well as yours. In a way, when I pull this trigger I’ll be killing you both off.” “Then your problems are much bigger than writing. You need help and not just writing help.” “A life coach, maybe? Or an eternal-life coach? You weren’t concerned about my life as a struggling writer, but funny, now you’re concerned about my soul? What are you going to throw against me next?” “What’s another fiction character to you?” he said. “For me, characters are alive. Even dead ones... I think a lot about the dead characters in fiction. Like all those Game of Thrones characters slaughtered. And yours, and others. Killed off characters, cast off, abandoned, many sealed away in forgotten books like tombs, the angry meta-dead who are trapped in an alternate reality of humanity’s collective unconscious. Just as the Bible says, ‘in the midst of life, we are in death,’ so in the midst of fiction there is death. Think of the casualties... the sublime Ayesha in the novel She who, to renew her immortality, bathed her unearthly loveliness in a flaming pillar of fire once too often - only to shrivel into a shrieking monkey-corpse thousands of years old at the end of the story... the romantic wartime nurse Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms who died in childbirth, amid great pathos, leaving the stoic Hemingway hero to walk back alone to his hotel room in the rain... dead Romeo and Juliet... murder victims in Sherlock Holmes novels, a string of James Bond villains like Doctor No and Goldfinger...” He shrugged. “Thousands of killed off characters, thousands of authors guilty of it, so why take it out on me?” “Because the other authors didn’t reject me the way you did.” “I said I’m sorry. I told you. A published author has to be careful about what people send them.” “Because there are crazy people out there?” He didn’t answer that. “Pity, really,” he said. “What?” “You. This. You’re an unusual and spirited young woman who’d make a great book character.” “I should spare you so you can put me in a book?” “Just saying. Do you not get a sense of the terrible waste in what you are contemplating? Of your life as well as mine. You could have put your imagination to writing this scenario instead of acting it out. So just do that instead. Go home and write it. How ironic if you have finally hit on your first great publishable idea and you’re simply going to throw it away.” “That’s clever. But you are forgetting something. I’m me. So it won’t fly. Never does.” “You have a highly developed sense of grievance. And self pity, but not much pity for anybody else, it seems.” “Careful. You’re openly antagonising me now.” “It has to be said. Stop being bloody stupid and go home and do what writers do. Write the story! Call it ‘Death by Fan Fiction’ if you like.” She shook her head. “See? Best-seller titles just come to you. Never to me. But what about the ending? I want to know how it goes, how it feels ending you.” “Have you thought of using imagination instead? Writers do it and it’s far less messy. Have you ever killed a human being before?” “No, and I don’t plan to. I plan to kill a selfish and heartless author...” He had recovered from shock and reached the anger stage. “Oh for god’s sake.” “An author who likes to play god,” she said. “And what are you playing?” Silence again but that big scribbly pen out front kept on relentlessly writing drama, building up to the story climax. “What’s your name?” he said. “You want a nameless author’s name?” “Real name. Not some cowardly nom de plume. I think I deserve to know my nemesis.” “Call me Jess.” “Jessica. Well, Jess, this is an unexpected journey,” he said. “And that’s a cliche. But you’re allowed it because you’ve got the best-selling authors’ dispensation.” “My, you are bitter.” “Spend a day in my shoes.” “Not with those heels. How long have I got before the tunnel?” “A few minutes. Any last words?” “I suppose I should compose something memorable. It’s funny, you never know what words to say at departures, whether it’s saying goodbye at a train station, or at an airport, or at a funeral. We all become inarticulate and reach for the comfort of clichés.” “You want me to write your last words?” she said. “At this moment you could probably do it better.” “Okay, here goes...” He would listen carefully to these words from her.