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 53: He favored her with a sour look.
He favored her with a sour look. Sophie nodded but kept walking back to her desk. She knew that Mr. Evers was not pleased she wasn’t taking on any extra work from anyone and wondered if she should mention it. ‘They will probably tell him in his meeting.’
Kristen smirked at her as she walked by and Sophie suspected Mr. Evers would also complain about her not being a team player.
‘And his conference room meeting isn’t until after lunch,’ Sophie thought as she continued on and settled back at her desk. ‘I wonder how that will affect his lunch schedule.’
The rest of the team rarely took less than an hour and a half for lunch, often longer. As Sophie unlocked her computer she pulled up the meeting e-mail. Evers was scheduled for his conference time at exactly one pm.
‘He’s going to have to hustle to be back by then,’ Sophie thought. She unlocked her files and began taking them back out of the drawer.
“We are going to have to do lunch early because of these meetings,” Sophie heard Ever’s say. “Can you be ready to go in ten minutes?” Sophie rolled her eyes as Kristen responded in the affirmative.
‘I guess if you can’t stay out until one thirty you leave early,’ she thought as she slipped in her ear buds and opened the top file on her stack. Sophie got back to work and a few minutes later she heard everyone leave for an early lunch. Deciding that she wasn’t yet ready to eat her sandwich, Sophie continued working.
At noon, she took her lunch out of her bag and shifted the files to the side as she ate. As she did, Sophie wondered why she wasn’t asked about the others. ‘And I wonder what will happen when Mr. Evers is told I can’t take other files on.’
Deciding it was out of her hands, Sophie finished her lunch while listening to a podcast in Italian about upcoming trends for the new season. She was pleased there were fewer words she needed to look up than she expected and thought that with a little more practice she might be able to listen to the Italian podcasts while working. Sophie made a note of the few words she didn’t grasp and before ending her lunch break, she looked up a translation on her phone, adding them to her vocabulary list. Happy with her progress, she went back to work.
A few minutes before one there was a great deal of movement and Sophie heard the others coming back from lunch. She felt her own nerves flutter as she realized that Mr. Evers would soon be talking about her with the others. She suspected he would talk about her absence and about the fact that she was not a team player and that they might tell him that she couldn’t take on others work anymore.
While Sophie didn’t think she was in danger of being fired any more, she suspected the meeting with Mr. Evers would not make her work week a smooth one. ‘I can’t do anything about it,’ she told herself. She took a deep breath and turned back to the computer, turning up the volume on her podcast, an English one, to block out any conversations and speculation she might hear.
Ten til Midnight 