The Fifteen Minute Novel is a novel written fifteen minutes at a time with each week day’s section starting with the sentence from the previous day. At least it is attempting to be a novel. For now I am just aiming at one continuous story, worked on for fifteen minutes each day. Started Friday January 1st, 2021 (in case you want to search for the beginning. I can’t wait to see where it ends up. It could be good, or it could be a mess. We’ll have to see. For now, here is today’s fifteen minutes.
Day 96: ‘Besides,’ He thought. “At the moment I have nothing else to do.’
‘Besides,’ He thought. “At the moment I have nothing else to do.’
James settled in with the book. Cassie was never the best of writers, but she hired a good ghost writer who made the prose not only pleasant to read, but sound almost plausible. Only the fact that he knew several of the events were attended by a different cast, caused him to look suspiciously at all the claims.
He was several chapters in when the thought that glimmered in the back of his mind started to edge forward, coalescing out of the shadows of his mind. Many of the incidents mentioned were familiar to him, however he knew they had been adjusted from reality in order to make the current players look better. As a consequence he took all of the other episodes mentioned with the same large pinch of skepticism.
‘But someone would have had to tell the writer about the events I know about,’ James realized. ‘Otherwise the details wouldn’t match. The Ghost writer wouldn’t have just made something up that happened to match the real details of the story so well. Maybe those other stories that I don’t know about aren’t made up out of the writer’s imagination either.’
James flipped back over the chapters he previously read. Remembering that he had a pen and notepad still in his satchel, he slid off the bed, retrieved them and returned to his position sitting cross-legged in the center of the hastily made bed. He made notations of all the events that seemed unfamiliar to him. He jotted down the page numbers and the general dates given in the book for the event. He suspected the dates were as fictitious as those given for the events he knew about but figured that there had to be a logic behind where they were mentioned.
“One story reminding someone of the other,” he muttered to himself. He added a line about each of the stories that surrounded the ones he didn’t know. Because of his familiarity, he didn’t need more than a sentence and swiftly moved out of the previously read chapters and into fresh ones. James paused in his writing, stretched his fingers and began once again to read.
Periodically James would add to his list. He had no doubt there would be a pattern. Whether that Pattern would be important or merely a construct of an editor had yet to be determined. He could reach the end of the book and find it was just chronological, or my category. For all he knew the stories could all be grouped together due to the use of the word bicycle. There was no reason the grouping had to be significant beyond an attempt to get the prose to flow naturally. But the deeper James went into the book, the more something nagged at the back of his mind. He was sure there was a pattern, he just couldn’t see it. He needed to lay out the parts before him and look at it as a whole before he could see it. Like looking at the box lid before putting together the puzzle pieces.
He continued alternating between reading and note taking until a soft knock sounded on his door. James looked up and blinked as his eyes shifted to look at the room around him. The sun was much stronger now.
He started to call out to whoever knocked but remembered he bolted the door.
Ten til Midnight 