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 22: “Sorry,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Sorry,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No problem,” Sophie said as she tried to get her heartrate back to normal. She pressed pause on her mp3 and slipped out one of her wireless headphones. “Its just usually quiet when everyone is at lunch so I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“Understandable. What are you listening to?”
“Oh, I’m teaching myself Italian,” Sophie said.
“Nice,” Elizabeth said. “Planning a trip to Italy?”
“Not any time soon,” Sophie said. The comments about her getting time off given to her to go run away on vacation echoed through her head. “There were some Italian fashion articles and podcasts I wanted to be able to understand. I figured the language lessons worked well enough for French, I might as well try it for the Italian ones.”
“Fashion,” Elizabeth said. “I might have known. I think I saw similar trousers like that in a magazine recently.”
Sophie looked down. She was wearing the trousers she spent the weekend prior creating. “That was the inspiration for the pattern.” She said.
“You made these?” She asked.
“I did. It’s sort of a hobby of mine.”
“Well, they look amazing.” Elizabeth shook her head and studied the trousers. “Straight off the magazine. I didn’t mean to get distracted. I meant to ask if your supervisor…Don Evers,” she said after a moment of thought. “If he discussed passing your projects on to anyone.”
“No,” Sophie said. “When I came back from speaking to you and Sean, I asked him and he said he would deal with it. He hasn’t mentioned it since. I was going to ask him after lunch.”
Elizbeth nodded. “He hasn’t filed any plans. If you could send an e-mail to me once you have talked to him letting me know what he decided that would be helpful. We want to make sure that everyone is on the same page.”
“Sure,” Sophie said.
“Excellent,” Elizabeth replied. “I’ll let you get back to work then. I don’t want you to have to stay late tonight on my account.”
“Thanks,” Sophie replied. Elizabeth left and Sophie turned back to the computer. She frowned as she put her earphones back in. She expected Mr. Evers to ask her to go over the databases she worked with for whoever was going to be taking up her work while she was gone. ‘At the very least to see if they had any questions.’ That hadn’t happened.
Ten til Midnight 