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 131: Sophie smiled.
Sophie smiled. “I took one of the designs I came up with and made several different drawings in a similar style. I just made the first piece and was going to start working on the next.”
“Oh, like a collection?” Janine said. She looked excited. “You have to show me.”
They paused the movie and Sophie went to retrieve the first of the pieces she created. It was a long dress and she swept it dramatically into the living room.
Janine’s reaction was everything she could have hoped for. There were oohs and ahhs and Janine looked genuinely excited. “That is so different than your usual stuff,” she said. “I mean it isn’t but it is.”
“I know,” Sophie said. “I just sort of let myself go and not worry about where I would wear it. Or any of the pieces actually.” She took the dress back to her work room and hung it on the rack. She picked up her sketch pad and brought it in. She sat back down and she slowly flipped through the sketches with Janine.
“I haven’t finalized these yet, but they are in progress,” Sophie said.
Janine nodded as she slowly turned the pages. “Soph, these are fantastic. What are you going to do once you have made them all?”
“I haven’t decided, yet,” Sophie said. She shrugged. “Right now I am just concentrating on making them.”
“Well keep me posted because I really think you have something here.”
Sophie grinned and they set the notebook aside and turned the movie back on. Sophie was creating the garments in her collection because she wanted to. She didn’t have any plans beyond that. However, it was very nice to have someone appreciate both the garments and the work that was going into them.
‘Its also nice to have someone think of them as a collection and not laugh at me for it because I’m not a real designer.’
She and Janine finished the movie and Janine left. Sophie disposed of the empty containers and decided the left-over Chinese food would be a good dinner for Monday night.
‘If I don’t have to cook, I can spend more time on my own things,’ she thought. As Monday was not a day she ate out for lunch, she assembled the lunch she would take with her and put it in the fridge. Feeling excited about her project, especially as Janine seemed to like it as well, Sophie returned to her couch and once again opened her notebook, playing around with the next item on her list as she adjusted the lines so that it flowed better and was more in keeping with the style of the first garment she made.
She went to bed feeling happy and settled. The next morning, she went to work and as she thought Linda passed around the story of Kristen and Ryan’s parking lot storm offs. Sophie said good morning to everyone and went into her office. With her podcasts and homemade lunch, she didn’t hear any more gossip and went home forgetting all about her co-worker’s eager to work on her sleepwear sets and sketch out her pattern pieces for her new project. Tuesday began as usual and when she went to lunch, the gossip was mostly about Brenda’s son receiving acceptance letters to all three of the universities he applied to for the fall.
Ten til Midnight 