The fifteen minute novel writing experiment is a attempt to write a complete (and very rough) draft of a novel by writing for fifteen minutes each day. I have taken a timed writing from one of the daily prompts done in 2021, cleaned it up a little and used it as my jumping off point into a story. Each day I will take the last line of the story written the day before and use it as my sentence starter and write for fifteen minutes, growing the story as the year progresses.
Day 80: She peered in expecting to find a small cupboard with some rags, and possibly a broom.
She peered in expecting to find a small cupboard with some rags, and possibly a broom. Instead Anya found herself stepping into a small study. It was as dust covered as the one she fell into the day before so she had no fear that she was intruding on someone else’s private domain.
‘Whoever once used this space left long ago,’ Anya thought. She stepped inside and for a moment thought it was the same study. So similar was its arrangement that it felt like the same room. ‘No,’ she corrected herself. There are no stairs leading to a secret panel, and there is a window instead of a square cut into the stone.
While there was some light coming in from the open door, Anya moved to the window and pulled back the curtain. As she touched it, part of the rotted material came off in her hand. She frowned and set it down on the dusty floor. She turned away from the window and decrepit curtain to look at the rest of the room.
Like the one she found the day before, there were bookshelves filled with books that no one dusted in ages. Given the state of the curtain, Anya refrained from touching them. Watching them crumble to dust was not something she wanted to set into motion.
There were no bowls left on the work table this time, but there were long thin shapes laid out under a blanket of dust. Anya stepped closer and saw they were tools of some sort. What they were used for she couldn’t guess as none of them looked even vaguely familiar. Some of them looked as though they might be sharp and she decided against touching them. There was an unused fireplace and two comfortable looking chairs, each with their own footstools placed in front of them.
While she was certain that once they were comfortable, Anya suspected that dust would rise up in a cloud and choke her if she dared to sit in one. She turned her attention instead to the papers pinned to the walls. Here where there was more light than she had the night before and she was not shocked and feeling the pain of a surprise tumble, Anya moved around looking at the papers pinned to the wall. She lifted a hand to brush a spot clear, thought better of it and walked over to the curtain. She bent down to pick up the torn shred thinking it would do for a dust rag. She bumped the door as she did so and it slowly closed, clicking back into place. She could see by the handle that it wasn’t locked, but she decided she felt better with the door open and moved to open it. As she reached for the handle, Anya heard footsteps as someone entered the library.
‘Two some ones,’ Anya thought.
She wondered if she was allowed to be in the room. She had been given permission to enter the library, but no one said anything about the spaces beyond. The thought stopped her hand before she could touch the door latch.
“She appears to have gone,” a woman’s voice said. Anya froze recognizing the woman from the night before.
“Given the disturbance in the dust she will no doubt want to be clean before the mid-day meal,” another woman said. To Anya it sounded like the matron. “The Dovish are nothing if not sticklers for bodily cleanliness.”
Ten til Midnight 