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 166: Tucker had already hung up.
Tucker had already hung up. James stared at the silent phone. Telling him to leave it be was the right thing. James knew that. He simply disliked the feeling of being in charge of his own fate. James smiled and shook his head at that. He never thought he was a control freak before.
‘And I wasn’t in charge of my fate before either.’
They were old thoughts and most of them were easy to shrug off. He was raised to work for the company, learned all of the ins and outs as he was growing up. He performed every job within the company that needed to be done and eventually found his place. He went to school to get the education the final position within the company demanded and that was that.
James took out his soup and sandwich. The soup was still hot so he decided to eat it first. He took a spoon from the drawer and sat down at the table eating it from the take out bowl. The soup was good. It had a deep rich flavor to it that spoke of both time and care. Flavors danced on his tongue and momentarily drew him away from his own thoughts. As he became accustomed to the flavors, James found himself shrugging.
‘If I hadn’t gone to school for what I planned then I don’t know what I would have gone for,’ he thought.
And that was the crux of his issue he decided as he kept eating the soup. If left to his own devices he didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself. He was drifting. He could see him sitting in class if need be, but he wanted an end game for the class. He wanted the class to be working towards something. He didn’t want to sit and take a knitting class unless for some reason he decided he needed a blanket made from his own hands.
‘Or maybe got involved in a knit based business,’ James decided as he delved deeper into his soup bowl. If he worked with anything involving knitting products he could see himself taking a class so he would understand it, just as he had worked in the different decisions of the company.
In truth though, knit and a knitting based business held very little appeal to him.
“I could take a wine class,” he said to himself between two spoonful’s of soup. “I like wine and it would be nice to learn more about it.”
James remembered several of his friends and their wives taking such courses. This made him frown, as did his spoon scraping the bottom of the soup bowl. He set the spoon and bowl aside and reached for the sandwich.
The problem with the wine class is that is seemed a little too much like something he would have done in his former life. Faith almost talked him into going before things went south for them and she no longer wanted or needed to spend time with him. As James was avoiding things from his past life, this seemed like something he might want to avoid as well.
He tried to think of things that he liked that didn’t involve the company. There was the car of course. But he didn’t need to take classes for that. He just needed to pick up parts and work on it, or a project car he picked up to work on. There was swimming, but that again didn’t require a class, but more the availability of a pool. ‘I suppose I could look for one,’ he thought as he bit into his sandwich.
Ten til Midnight 