Good morning everyone and Happy New Year! Each year for the past few years I play around with the concept of a fifteen minute novel. In this exercise I write on the same story fifteen minutes a day using the last sentence from the previous day as the starting point. I really enjoy it and find that it lets me get through a story that might otherwise languish on the side lines. And I really like seeing the story take shape. Sometimes it goes according to plan. Most of the time it doesn’t not really. I have started with a basic outline. I have started with no outline. Sometimes the story will even follow the outline that I set. Last year I had a main character rebellion and then realized rather late in the year that the story I planned to tell was not the story that was coming out. It will require quite a bit of editing.
The thing is that whether it flows smoothly or not each year I learn something. Sometimes it is about how I write and how I put together stories. Sometimes it is about the types of stories I want to tell.
I usually take a previous writing prompt for my starting point. Throughout the year I will mark various prompts that I wrote in out morning writing prompts and I will flag them for expansion. Sometimes I add a bit of an outline that day other times I just highlight them and plan to come back. This year I am going to do something a little different.
A while back I used various elements from a story idea for examples. If you’ve been reading for a while then you may recognize Bob and the Alien Slug Monsters. Well I kept telling myself I would make time to write Bob’s story and never quite got around to it. Still it has stayed in the back of my head. So this is the year. Bob versus the Alien Slug Monsters is this years fifteen minute novel. I have a rough outline of where I want it to go. Will it go there? Maybe. Will it take all year? Possibly not. Either way it is Bob’s time to shine. And so we start with the first installment. That’s right, Day 1. Enjoy.
Day 1
Bob sighed. He looked at Marty who stood on the other side of his desk, a hopeful look on his face. “You know you can’t declare this as a company expense, right?” Bob asked. He kept his tone calm and even. He mentally added ‘You bonehead,’ but managed to keep that addition in his head.
Marty’s smile fell. “But it was a business expense,” Marty replied. His nasally voice had a bit oif a whine to it and Bob tried not to wince. “I had to eat right?”
“Eat, yes,” Bob said. Marty looked instantly relieved. “And as we have the receipt for the meal we can put that on your expenses. You can’t invoice the strippers even if you did eat at the gentleman’s club.”
Bob knew he would never be able to the name of the club, The Bootylicious Kitty Klub, out without massive does of sarcasm.
“But if I had a receipt?” Marty asked hopefully.
Bob shook his head. “We don’t pay for entertainment during the meal,” Bob told him. “Remember when Lucy had dinner at the dine in movie theater? We paid for the meal but not the movie ticket.”
Marty sagged. “Oh,” he said. “I guess I can’t claim that your biased then.”
Part of Bob wanted to see what sort of HR skew Marty could make the strip club versus movie theater reimbursement but he remained professional. “Nope, ‘fraid not,” he replied.
Marty heaved a heavy sigh and left Bob’s office, heading back to his desk. Once Bob felt bad for the invoices he refused to reimburse for the company. That sympathy long since dried up as the claims made by the five most frequent travelers in the office tended to live on the corner of ridiculousness and insanity.
“At least he was trying for meal time entertainment,” Bob muttered to himself. Last week Lucille had tried to involve the company for pet therapy. Apparently, Mr. Tiddles was a nervous wreck when she went away. Bob managed to agree that Mr. Tibble’s mental state was of prime importance, however he had to refuse her request.
He turned back to his computer with a quick look at the wall clock. Even though he knew there was a clock on his computer, he still always checked the big clock for the end of the day time. He was fairly certain that it was a school day hold over. The clock had been purchased by their supervisor, Mr. Anderson when the smaller schools combined into one feeder school for the county. Anything that wasn’t being transferred to the new school was sold off. Anderson bought several clocks from one of the schools and stationed them around the office. He set them for different time zones but forgot to mark which was which.
Ten til Midnight 