Off Season - Nanowrimo 2017 Novella

Day 27 I was out for only a few seconds. Miss Ozaki knelt over me and felt for my pulse as I came to. She asked me how I felt and after a few seconds I realised what had happened, where I was and I told her I was ok. I said I must have become dehydrated due my heavy costume and the stage lighting. I didn’t mention that I’d hardly eaten for the past two weeks. After some fussing the party restarted and I went to sit down in the corner. The chairman nodded to men as he walked past but didn’t say anything. I wondered if my collapse had ruined my chances. Later on Miss Ozaki drove me home and told me that I’d performed well. The chairman had nodded to her, giving the signal that started my musical career properly. I went back to my home town and spend a few days with my family and friends. My mother and father had hardly changed by I barely recognised my younger sisters. They’d grown so much in a just a year. Most of my friends were getting on well with their university studies. One

Day 16. Even more monologue. Flowers in the Autumn came back to me. It was the song that had brought me to Tokyo but I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. When I was at home I used to write songs quite often. Almost all of them weren’t good but I enjoyed getting my thoughts out and twisting them into verse and chorus. A lot of romantic longings and melodrama. I was embarrassed when I read Flowers over again. It was extremely melodramatic and full of cliche. I told myself that I’d been a teenager when I wrote it so of course it wasn’t going to be very good. I knew I had changed since I’d left home. Not just the weight loss but emotionally too. The year I left home was when a lot of things happened to me for the first time so it was inevitable that things would push and pull me into some new kind of shape. I wasn’t my old self and I wasn’t quite myself new self, as if I could ever be a finalised, never changing thing. No one is ever going to think, ‘I’m done. That’s it, I’

Day 15. The continuation of Keiko's story. This will take place over many locations and over a much longer period of time in the second draft. Day 15 For the first few weeks in Tokyo I didn’t miss home. It was such a big, sprawling city with so many things to do and see. It also seemed that my friends I are were preparing to part ways. Most of us planned to go to university and would probably end up all over the country. Of course we all promised to keep in touch. You can guess how that turned out. I busied myself with getting to know my roommates and on the weekends we used to go to see the sights. I worked once or twice a week in the beginning. I’d either go to the record company’s studio or to other, smaller studios. The work was varied, singing on radio jingles, vocals for tv adverts, all sorts of small things. I was shocked the first time I heard myself on the radio. It was an advert for a laundry detergent. There was a little jingle at the start and the end, I had to oo

Day 14. Keiko's back story. I have related this as one long conversation. I may change it in the second draft to occur over a longer period of time and various scenes. Day 14 Day 14 The next morning Harry rose to the sound birds, a of small flock of brightly coloured balls of feathers inspecting the leaf litter beneath a still vibrant shrub. In an uncharacteristic fit of conscientiousness he went straight to his laptop and set about studying the finer details of the hotel proposal. The papers outlined at a fairly high level the proposal to build a medium sized eco-hotel at the Blue Tor. The budget and the potential profit for his company was high, not enough to solve all its problems but good enough to set things in the right direction and keep Harry in a job for the foreseeable future. He paced around the small courtyard in front of the lodge, rehearsing his best lines and jabbing the air enthusiastically as he drove home salient points. He’d been too pessimistic last