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 134: Anya read through books on flora and fauna first.
Anya read through books on flora and fauna first. It was an interesting study as she found many of the familiar plants had different names. She began keeping a list of the differing names and reminding herself that they were the same plant. In addition to the foreign names everything it seemed had many more uses than she thought possible.
The books on magic itself were interesting. There were spells. Things that would adjust her senses for a longer or shorter time. There were spells to create potions and tinctures, many similar to the ones the healers used, only slightly enhanced. There were spells to create objects like the orb she used to follow events outside of the hidden spaces. They were both enlightening and frustrating.
In most of them tools and ingredients were needed. Some of the ingredients needed were organic and some were metal or stone. None of them were things she could currently acquire. While Anya could pilfer from the garden, she couldn’t find anything fresh due to the winter and most of the other elements that she might need simple weren’t around or in places she could access without being noticed.
Instead Anya looked at the ingredients, made certain she could identify them and when a specific tool was located, she would track down the tool so that she had it to hand. Like many of the books there were duplicates, And like the books, the tools soon piled up. She found another larger room with a larger work area and began to use it to place the tools she found. Unlike the books she stacked in an additional space, these tools she laid out neatly across the table and every few days she would return, listing the tools and their names in her head and going over their uses.
She wanted to be ready to try to use them when the time came. While Anya was still uncertain about the type of magic she might have should she prove to have magic at all, she was finding the study interesting. The more she learned of magic, the more she enjoyed learning about it. Magic seemed to her to combine many aspects of the healers and craftsmen she grew up with, only on a more intense scale.
‘And even if I don’t use it, I am learning more about plants and animals.’ She thought. ‘Just knowing about the mushrooms was helpful.’
Anya thought of her journey to the House of the Star. So many times she passed clusters of unknown mushrooms. Had she known what they were, she would not have had to worry about her small collection of rations lasting her. Now, with her new knowledge, Anya was certain that she could manage to gather herbs, edible plants, nuts, seeds and mushrooms to see her through a journey.
‘Which means if I take a decent supply of rations, then I could possibly extend them with what I find to get me to where I am going.’ That was a comfort. She knew she couldn’t leave at the moment as winter still held sway, and wasn’t sure where she would go if she did, but was certain that she could not only reach a new destination but have more than just knowledge of laundry when she arrived to help her find a position.
The thought was a comfort. With potential positions in mind, as the days slipped by Anya started to branch out in her reading, delving into the books she thought of as Guild secrets.
Ten til Midnight 