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 214: Sophie nodded and made a note in her notebook.
Sophie nodded and made a note in her notebook. “That’s the number there?” she asked. Janine nodded and Sophie jotted it down.
“And here is the deadline by which they will need it,” Janine added. “There are also dates if you are doing your own collections for different seasons.”
Sophie nodded again and marked down all of the dates. She tried not to think about all of the design inspirations she made notes of while she was gone as she made certain she had her deadlines set.
“With those,” Janine continued, “I will need a few days notice so I can get photographs to send to them.” This time they looked at the calendar and blocked out photograph dates for potential collections. While she knew it was preemptive as she hadn’t made the collections yet, Sophie liked seeing the deadlines listed out. She always did better knowing there was a point she was working towards. If she skipped the collection or knew she couldn’t get it in time, then she at least could know that in advance.
‘And I can plan future trips around them.’ She felt certain knowing what her schedule looked like would help her plan to incorporate mor things that weren’t work in her life. ‘Gotta know where the posts are if you are going to navigate around them.’
Her meeting with Janine didn’t take long and when she left Sophie did a quick check of her finances and decided that she could use some of her saved money from her sewing business to purchase the supplies she would need for upcoming projects.
‘After all it is a business expense.’ She had been working with the accountant and had a file full of receipts and a small ledger book with notations for the next time she met with him. ‘And I am not buying anything for myself on this run, its all business related.’
Feeling good about things, Sophie drove out to the Fabric Emporium and spent a delightful few hours stocking up on all of the basics and getting ahead on some of the items she knew she would be able to use. She returned home heavily laden and feeling good about her purchases.
In her work room she put everything away and then took her various lists and her laptop to the bed. She sat in the center and spread out her lists around her. Sophie pulled up her calendar. The first thing she did was block out her work days for Havers. She made the blocks a pretty blue color as blocking them out in red made her calendar look very angry.
To differentiate, Sophie then put the deadlines for Janine in green. ‘And my personal ones will be in purple,’ Sophie decided. As of yet she didn’t have any purple ones.
“But I do have more green,” she realized. Sophie knew about how long it took her to make each of the dressing gowns. Since she know had a deadline for when they needed to be shipped off, she backtracked, adding the creation of them to her schedule so that she knew shat she needed to do when in order to have them completed well in advance of the deadline.
She then did the same thing with the monthly sleep sets and then started filtering the working slots for her own collections. The schedule was filling up, however there was still space.
Ten til Midnight 