The Fifteen Minute Novel is an attempt to take a single prompt and use the last sentence written each day as a start for the next day. This year I had several prompts circling around a similar story, so I have combined them. However, the story starts the same way each day, with the last line from the day before and a timer set for fifteen minutes. The hope is to end up with a complete, if very rough draft by the end of the year. Some stories are better than others, but I always learn a whole lot about my own writing when I do this so for me it is not only a nice way to work out a story, but it is a tool for helping my writing get better. And so, we continue this story for 2024 with…
Day 2: Luckily the work wasn’t too difficult.
Luckily the work wasn’t too difficult. ‘Maybe I won’t have to stay too late,’ she decided as her fingers click clacked over the keyboard and the pile of folders became slowly shorter. She finished the entry and realized it was not one of her projects but one that got dumped on her earlier in the week by someone who simply didn’t have time to do it.
Sophie tried not to think too much about why Kristen didn’t have time to complete the project. In general, she tried to stay out of her co-worker’s business. The fact that she would have to be bone numbingly idiotic not to know that Kristen was having an affair with Ryan despite both of them being married and that many of their extended meetings had nothing to do with work was something she tried to pretend she didn’t know. Sophie sighed and saw that to finish filing this report she would have to put in a personnel code. The code was like their in-house electronic signature. She knew that as this was one of Kristen’s projects, she should probably put Kristen’s code.
‘But I don’t know her code.’ Sophie thought. She couldn’t move on to the next project until she finished this one, complete with code, so she put her own code in the space. ‘If it needs changing then I can always go back later,’ she thought as she closed the file and set it to the side.
By the time others trouped back in, Sophie made great headway in the stack she was given. She knew she had other things demanding her attention, but the urge to clear off her desk completely was too strong to resist so she continued. Time ticked away and for once no one bothered her. With her earphones in she couldn’t hear any gossip floating around so she didn’t know if they were simply busy with other things or had decided that as it was Friday they should just run out the end of their day and start the weekend quietly.
Sophie had high hopes that she wouldn’t have to stay too late if she could just concentrate. Just as the others started to gather their things for the end of the day, she reached for the final folder. It was the one Mr. Evers walked over to her before lunch. Sophie picked it up and opened it. She listed to the others as they left, their noises filtering through her language lessons. Maybe set up wouldn’t be as bad as she thought. She opened the file and looked it over.
‘Crap,’ she thought as she flipped through the first few pages. The project was for a database she rarely worked with. ‘Better to get it set up now than to have to start with it on Monday,’ she told herself. She already knew there would be a new stack of her own work to input waiting for her when she clocked in Monday morning and didn’t want to spend the bulk of her day on this if she could help it.
It was slow going at first, but Sophie soon got the rhythm of the database down and sped through the initial set up. Finally, she reached a place where she could stop and leave it for the weekend. Sophie closed the file and looked at the computer. It was later than she thought.
Ten til Midnight 