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alicia_hExtracts from my nanowrimo novel (tentatively titled "The Carnival is Over" after The Seekers' song) from each day since the 4th of November, which is rather lucky as days 2 and 3 were rather unproductive! I'll be tidying up this with headings, summaries and such tomorrow and, all going well, I should have a fifth extract at some point as well.
edit: they're all up now and everything's neat and tidy.
Title: The Carnival is Over
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original
Word Count: 390
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): drug use (weed)
Summary: Folk singer Quin Shakespeare muses on the times he's visited England.
1. Quin Shakespeare thinks of her as he rolls himself a fresh joint. He had promised himself that he would cut down on the weed and he realises he really should be. The highs never hit him in quite the same way when he is alone and now he is alone in this strange country for the first time since his very first trip to England five years ago.
Sitting alone in this hotel room is nothing like the noise and the crush and the constant rush and movement of being on tour.This room, actually a suite of rooms, is practically identical in size to the ones he had stayed in during his last tour but now the space feels ten million times bigger than it had before. The smoke dissipates far too quickly around him so that he finds it impossible to get the secondary high it usually gives him when the joint itself just is not enough.
Quin is surprised to find himself reminiscing not about his last tour but about that first visit over here. Visions swim before his eyes of the first English folk clubs he stumbled into. At the time he could not help comparing them to the ones back home. He had been highly annoyed, maybe more accurately frustrated, that they had not taken to him so kindly or quickly in those places as they had back over in the New York clubs. It starts to become clear to him now that they never took to him quickly in New York after all. He just imagined it that way because by the time he was on his way over here, he had struggled many, many months to get to the point of making himself noticed (a few of his British girlfriends, especially those ones who played music themselves had called it a long hard slog and he really liked using that word to describe it even if no one else at home knew what he meant by it) and then coming over here and having to start over again with all the English folk club crowds had made the people in New York who came to watch him and remembered his name far more preferable than those who were wary of this strange skinny American boy who still had not decided on his new name.
Word Count: 559
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): none
Summary: During her recording session, a grieving Rosemary Hope is shocked to see the face of a man who should not be there.
2. Gazing dreamily out through the glass wall of the recording booth in the studio as she holds the final note of her song, Rosemary Hope believes she sees a hauntingly familiar face. It is just for a second and yet that second lasts long enough to startle her and, when her furiously fast heart rate slows down, to leave her with a deep shock and confusion solidifying in her soul. She blinks a few times, at first with curiosity and then to clear her eyes of tears so that she can see the true face of the man sitting before her. Within the space of those few blinks the face blurs from being that of the man she expected to see there and resolves into the face of the relative stranger drafted in at the last minute to take his place. He grins at her, giving her two thumbs up on her performance of the song, which she somehow, though she cannot even tell how herself, finished without screaming or crying or breaking down or making any audible sign of her shock at all. He's pleased with her. Possibly even proud of his new musical charge already. He does not understand. It is possible he has not even been told what happened to his predecessor, the man who sat in his chair just a few days before and whose sweet wrappers and pencil shavings still litter the space around him. She realises something else. Even if he did know, it is likely he would not even care.
"That was great, my lovely! Practically perfect!" His voice booms out of her headphones, disproportionately loud and so positively uncomfortable that she cannot possibly hold back or hide her wince. "Do you think you can go again?"
"Again? I thought you just said it was perfect."
"Ah! Well there is always room for improvement, is there not, my dear?"
I am not your 'dear' or your 'lovely' and if you dare call me either of those things or anything else again I will either scream and refuse to stop screaming until you choose to leave or my manager forces your to leave, or I will personally drag you up to the studio roof and shove you over the edge, she thinks bitterly to herself but out loud she tells him and the other tech people milling around in the other room that she is actually gasping for a cup of tea and that she cannot possibly sing again until she's had a sit down and something, anything, to eat.
It works, as it always does, because they truly believe she means it when she says she cannot or will not sing until she has this, that or the other at her disposal. Often times, she will simply be trying it on to see just how far she can push some of them to wait upon her, their star of the moment. This time, however, she really does need to switch off her mind and her voice for a time. She also needs desperately to eat something, which is only just occurring to her now she has said it. She has barely eaten anything for days, which she could get away with when she was not working but now she is far more hungry than she has felt in an incredibly long time.
Word Count: 309
Pairings (if any): Nell/Quin
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc):
Summary: Nell meets Quin Shakespeare for the first time.
3. Nell and Quin met for the first time in a London night club. She was down there visiting her school friend Rosemary Hope. Rose was recording her first album after a couple of hit singles had somewhat disrupted her first A level year.
Unlike the coffee houses and skiffle basements Nell had grown used to up north, this particular club sold primarily alcohol. The owners of the establishment therefore frowned somewhat upon under eighteens venturing in. Nell was something of a young looking sixteen or seventeen year old and so she drew attention to herself quite quickly especially when you consider she was looking around herself in quite a bewildered manner as she searched for Rose, who she had not yet met up with since her arrival in London earlier that same day.
The whole room stank strongly of beer and cigarette smoke, positively reeking of it almost. Nell was nearly so turned off by this smell, which she at this point also realised was mingled with the sweat of all those dancing somewhere in the gloom in front of her, that she was prepared to turn back before they started questioning her about her age.
It was as she was at the point of confessing all to the three stern looking men in sharply pressed grey suits towering over her that somebody put an arm about her shoulders, leaned in to kiss her and then said pointedly, "Hey, great, you made it!"
The three men exchanged glances. Apparently having admitted silent defeat, they each shot suspicious looks at Nell and moved away, leaving her with her knight errant who she must presumably now find some way to thank for the strange rescue. That it was a rescue she had not asked for or was even entirely sure she had wanted would probably not make much of a difference.
Word Count: 742
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): none
Summary: Nell and the band meet Malcolm Green, the man who wants to be their manager for some reason.
4. "You say you do a bit of folk. What is it, a Bob Dylan sort of thing?" Then he indicated Nell and with only a moment's glance in her direction carried right on talking to or, more accurately, at the boys. "Or do you have her singing more traditional stuff? A Joan Baez, Judy Collins sort of girl?"
Although she would dearly have loved to have remained practically invisible to this man, Nell cleared her throat and spoke up for herself. "I like Peggy Seeger," she told him. Her voice came out a little quietly at first, which obviously did not help one jot with the distinct feeling of embarrassment that was currently encompassing her. However, she found her voice as she continued, growing at least slightly more confident. "My friend Rose gave me an album of hers. And I hear a lot of songs down at the folk clubs. I only really have the records that my uncle brings back from America."
"So he's a sailor, your uncle?" Malcolm asked bluntly.
Nell shook her head. "No. He flies planes. He works for Pan Am."
"I see. I see. So he's pretty much always going back and forth, yeah? Well, maybe you can ask him to bring back a few records, that is both singles and long playing mind, that he doesn't think you can get over here. And tell him to keep an eye out for bands with girls in especially. And if I give you lot a shopping list and a bit of spending money do you think you can manage to do a bit of research for me? Gather together a few songs you think you might want to play? Have a few fights amongst yourselves about what you actually want to sound like? Do you think you can all do that for me before the next time I see you?"
Without really giving them a chance to answer, and perhaps because he took their combined agreement as a given, he strode out of their make shift dressing room. He paused, presumably mid stride, in the hallway just outside.
Sticking his head back around the half closed door, Malcolm Green left one final piece of advice with them: "Oh, and make sure you ditch the dancers!"
He slammed the door behind him. Nobody dared think of following him, let alone suggesting it to any of the others. It seemed that their new manager, or was he only their potential new manager, was a force of nature and very clearly not a man to be reckoned with.
Nell ran into the interminable Mr Green the next day. He did not stop to chat but instead thrust a single into her hands and saying nothing but "See what you can do with that" before stalking off so fast that he simply seemed to disappear.
With some trepidation she turned the record over in her hand to see what it actually was. It turned out to be the Animals' version of The House of the Rising Sun. Nell had heard this song on the radio and caught about half of a performance of it on the telly. This man was definitely not going to let them off easily then, but at least it seemed he had some faith in them if this was how he wanted them to start.
Nell had taken it upon herself to track down some of the folk long playing records on Malcolm Green's precious list. Rather than waste the 'pocket money' he had given them, she had written to Rosemary asking if she could start them off with anything on there. Rosemary had sent up two records that Nell now vaguely remembered listening to during her time staying at her distant friend's attic bedsit flat in London. They were the first albums of two singers called Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Nell of course recognised the names especially now she had the two records in front of her but she had not given them very much thought since she had come back home. Her interest in folk music was honestly a lot more shallow than the impression that Malcolm Green had been given by the boys in the band's bragging about her skill at singing that sort of music.
Rose had included a short note which, once you got past the "hope this find you well"s and "much love"s, more or less said: "Well, it's a start."
Word Count: 582
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): none
Summary: Nell listens to Joan Baez's version of The House of the Rising Sun (and some waffling about her landlady's cats' names because I needed the word count damnit! ;-D )
5.
Despite the short length of Joan Baez's version of The House of the Rising Sun and Nell's now almost rabid attachment to the song, the female singer's voice lulled her and lured her in to such a degree that Nell found herself unable to move from the spot even after (the disappointingly short song) had finished. She carried on listening to the next few songs and was only brought out of her unexpected trance by the needle reaching the end of side one of the long playing record and hitting the dark, silent grooves in the middle so that all she could hear was the hiss and the click and the pop of the needle moving through the now music less vinyl.
Nell stood up slowly, unsteadily from her bed and moved over to her record player. She picked up the needle from the centre and drew it across. With the record still rotating beneath her and the words in the centre unreadable as they kept on spinning, Nell's hand hovered with the needle over the start of the long playing record. She hesitated but in the end did not drop the needle down. Instead she brought it all the way back across to rest by the side of the record, which for its own part clicked and clunked to a halt.
Nell knew she was missing something vital that would surely make listening to this record an even more perfect and profound experience. She realised that she needed a cup of tea.
The shared kitchen was mercifully still open when Nell reached it. Her landlady had been known in the past to lock the kitchen door past certain times at night and occasionally for several days at a time when she had apparently found it in a complete and utter mess by her tenants and had then been forced to clean up herself. This was a legendary reaction that had probably only happened the one time but had become a sort of folk lore among the inhabitants of the house to be passed down to each new person when they moved in. It was possible that the incident had never even happened at all and their landlady had merely started the tale and let it spread and grow and mutate into what it was now. Since the house had grown more into being a student house, the landlady had moved out into her own much smaller house that she presumably did not have to share with anyone other that her three cats. These three cats were rather boringly called Ginger, Tabby and Socks, even though little Ginger, the youngest of the bunch having been a parting gift from an affectionate tenant at the end of her final year of university, was herself both ginger and a tabby. Presumably her distinct fur colour was enough to distinguish her name wise from the cat whose brown tabby markings had inspired his name.
Nell arrived back in her bedroom and went over to her record player with her earthenware mug still in hand. She dropped the needle down at the very start of the record and then went back over to her bed, placed the steaming mug on the bed side table. She crawled under several layers of blankets and with her cup of tea clasped in both of her hands, she sat back against a pile of pillows and the head board and Nell let herself be drawn once again into the music.
edit: they're all up now and everything's neat and tidy.
Title: The Carnival is Over
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original
Word Count: 390
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): drug use (weed)
Summary: Folk singer Quin Shakespeare muses on the times he's visited England.
1. Quin Shakespeare thinks of her as he rolls himself a fresh joint. He had promised himself that he would cut down on the weed and he realises he really should be. The highs never hit him in quite the same way when he is alone and now he is alone in this strange country for the first time since his very first trip to England five years ago.
Sitting alone in this hotel room is nothing like the noise and the crush and the constant rush and movement of being on tour.This room, actually a suite of rooms, is practically identical in size to the ones he had stayed in during his last tour but now the space feels ten million times bigger than it had before. The smoke dissipates far too quickly around him so that he finds it impossible to get the secondary high it usually gives him when the joint itself just is not enough.
Quin is surprised to find himself reminiscing not about his last tour but about that first visit over here. Visions swim before his eyes of the first English folk clubs he stumbled into. At the time he could not help comparing them to the ones back home. He had been highly annoyed, maybe more accurately frustrated, that they had not taken to him so kindly or quickly in those places as they had back over in the New York clubs. It starts to become clear to him now that they never took to him quickly in New York after all. He just imagined it that way because by the time he was on his way over here, he had struggled many, many months to get to the point of making himself noticed (a few of his British girlfriends, especially those ones who played music themselves had called it a long hard slog and he really liked using that word to describe it even if no one else at home knew what he meant by it) and then coming over here and having to start over again with all the English folk club crowds had made the people in New York who came to watch him and remembered his name far more preferable than those who were wary of this strange skinny American boy who still had not decided on his new name.
Word Count: 559
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): none
Summary: During her recording session, a grieving Rosemary Hope is shocked to see the face of a man who should not be there.
2. Gazing dreamily out through the glass wall of the recording booth in the studio as she holds the final note of her song, Rosemary Hope believes she sees a hauntingly familiar face. It is just for a second and yet that second lasts long enough to startle her and, when her furiously fast heart rate slows down, to leave her with a deep shock and confusion solidifying in her soul. She blinks a few times, at first with curiosity and then to clear her eyes of tears so that she can see the true face of the man sitting before her. Within the space of those few blinks the face blurs from being that of the man she expected to see there and resolves into the face of the relative stranger drafted in at the last minute to take his place. He grins at her, giving her two thumbs up on her performance of the song, which she somehow, though she cannot even tell how herself, finished without screaming or crying or breaking down or making any audible sign of her shock at all. He's pleased with her. Possibly even proud of his new musical charge already. He does not understand. It is possible he has not even been told what happened to his predecessor, the man who sat in his chair just a few days before and whose sweet wrappers and pencil shavings still litter the space around him. She realises something else. Even if he did know, it is likely he would not even care.
"That was great, my lovely! Practically perfect!" His voice booms out of her headphones, disproportionately loud and so positively uncomfortable that she cannot possibly hold back or hide her wince. "Do you think you can go again?"
"Again? I thought you just said it was perfect."
"Ah! Well there is always room for improvement, is there not, my dear?"
I am not your 'dear' or your 'lovely' and if you dare call me either of those things or anything else again I will either scream and refuse to stop screaming until you choose to leave or my manager forces your to leave, or I will personally drag you up to the studio roof and shove you over the edge, she thinks bitterly to herself but out loud she tells him and the other tech people milling around in the other room that she is actually gasping for a cup of tea and that she cannot possibly sing again until she's had a sit down and something, anything, to eat.
It works, as it always does, because they truly believe she means it when she says she cannot or will not sing until she has this, that or the other at her disposal. Often times, she will simply be trying it on to see just how far she can push some of them to wait upon her, their star of the moment. This time, however, she really does need to switch off her mind and her voice for a time. She also needs desperately to eat something, which is only just occurring to her now she has said it. She has barely eaten anything for days, which she could get away with when she was not working but now she is far more hungry than she has felt in an incredibly long time.
Word Count: 309
Pairings (if any): Nell/Quin
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc):
Summary: Nell meets Quin Shakespeare for the first time.
3. Nell and Quin met for the first time in a London night club. She was down there visiting her school friend Rosemary Hope. Rose was recording her first album after a couple of hit singles had somewhat disrupted her first A level year.
Unlike the coffee houses and skiffle basements Nell had grown used to up north, this particular club sold primarily alcohol. The owners of the establishment therefore frowned somewhat upon under eighteens venturing in. Nell was something of a young looking sixteen or seventeen year old and so she drew attention to herself quite quickly especially when you consider she was looking around herself in quite a bewildered manner as she searched for Rose, who she had not yet met up with since her arrival in London earlier that same day.
The whole room stank strongly of beer and cigarette smoke, positively reeking of it almost. Nell was nearly so turned off by this smell, which she at this point also realised was mingled with the sweat of all those dancing somewhere in the gloom in front of her, that she was prepared to turn back before they started questioning her about her age.
It was as she was at the point of confessing all to the three stern looking men in sharply pressed grey suits towering over her that somebody put an arm about her shoulders, leaned in to kiss her and then said pointedly, "Hey, great, you made it!"
The three men exchanged glances. Apparently having admitted silent defeat, they each shot suspicious looks at Nell and moved away, leaving her with her knight errant who she must presumably now find some way to thank for the strange rescue. That it was a rescue she had not asked for or was even entirely sure she had wanted would probably not make much of a difference.
Word Count: 742
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): none
Summary: Nell and the band meet Malcolm Green, the man who wants to be their manager for some reason.
4. "You say you do a bit of folk. What is it, a Bob Dylan sort of thing?" Then he indicated Nell and with only a moment's glance in her direction carried right on talking to or, more accurately, at the boys. "Or do you have her singing more traditional stuff? A Joan Baez, Judy Collins sort of girl?"
Although she would dearly have loved to have remained practically invisible to this man, Nell cleared her throat and spoke up for herself. "I like Peggy Seeger," she told him. Her voice came out a little quietly at first, which obviously did not help one jot with the distinct feeling of embarrassment that was currently encompassing her. However, she found her voice as she continued, growing at least slightly more confident. "My friend Rose gave me an album of hers. And I hear a lot of songs down at the folk clubs. I only really have the records that my uncle brings back from America."
"So he's a sailor, your uncle?" Malcolm asked bluntly.
Nell shook her head. "No. He flies planes. He works for Pan Am."
"I see. I see. So he's pretty much always going back and forth, yeah? Well, maybe you can ask him to bring back a few records, that is both singles and long playing mind, that he doesn't think you can get over here. And tell him to keep an eye out for bands with girls in especially. And if I give you lot a shopping list and a bit of spending money do you think you can manage to do a bit of research for me? Gather together a few songs you think you might want to play? Have a few fights amongst yourselves about what you actually want to sound like? Do you think you can all do that for me before the next time I see you?"
Without really giving them a chance to answer, and perhaps because he took their combined agreement as a given, he strode out of their make shift dressing room. He paused, presumably mid stride, in the hallway just outside.
Sticking his head back around the half closed door, Malcolm Green left one final piece of advice with them: "Oh, and make sure you ditch the dancers!"
He slammed the door behind him. Nobody dared think of following him, let alone suggesting it to any of the others. It seemed that their new manager, or was he only their potential new manager, was a force of nature and very clearly not a man to be reckoned with.
Nell ran into the interminable Mr Green the next day. He did not stop to chat but instead thrust a single into her hands and saying nothing but "See what you can do with that" before stalking off so fast that he simply seemed to disappear.
With some trepidation she turned the record over in her hand to see what it actually was. It turned out to be the Animals' version of The House of the Rising Sun. Nell had heard this song on the radio and caught about half of a performance of it on the telly. This man was definitely not going to let them off easily then, but at least it seemed he had some faith in them if this was how he wanted them to start.
Nell had taken it upon herself to track down some of the folk long playing records on Malcolm Green's precious list. Rather than waste the 'pocket money' he had given them, she had written to Rosemary asking if she could start them off with anything on there. Rosemary had sent up two records that Nell now vaguely remembered listening to during her time staying at her distant friend's attic bedsit flat in London. They were the first albums of two singers called Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Nell of course recognised the names especially now she had the two records in front of her but she had not given them very much thought since she had come back home. Her interest in folk music was honestly a lot more shallow than the impression that Malcolm Green had been given by the boys in the band's bragging about her skill at singing that sort of music.
Rose had included a short note which, once you got past the "hope this find you well"s and "much love"s, more or less said: "Well, it's a start."
Word Count: 582
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): none
Summary: Nell listens to Joan Baez's version of The House of the Rising Sun (and some waffling about her landlady's cats' names because I needed the word count damnit! ;-D )
5.
Despite the short length of Joan Baez's version of The House of the Rising Sun and Nell's now almost rabid attachment to the song, the female singer's voice lulled her and lured her in to such a degree that Nell found herself unable to move from the spot even after (the disappointingly short song) had finished. She carried on listening to the next few songs and was only brought out of her unexpected trance by the needle reaching the end of side one of the long playing record and hitting the dark, silent grooves in the middle so that all she could hear was the hiss and the click and the pop of the needle moving through the now music less vinyl.
Nell stood up slowly, unsteadily from her bed and moved over to her record player. She picked up the needle from the centre and drew it across. With the record still rotating beneath her and the words in the centre unreadable as they kept on spinning, Nell's hand hovered with the needle over the start of the long playing record. She hesitated but in the end did not drop the needle down. Instead she brought it all the way back across to rest by the side of the record, which for its own part clicked and clunked to a halt.
Nell knew she was missing something vital that would surely make listening to this record an even more perfect and profound experience. She realised that she needed a cup of tea.
The shared kitchen was mercifully still open when Nell reached it. Her landlady had been known in the past to lock the kitchen door past certain times at night and occasionally for several days at a time when she had apparently found it in a complete and utter mess by her tenants and had then been forced to clean up herself. This was a legendary reaction that had probably only happened the one time but had become a sort of folk lore among the inhabitants of the house to be passed down to each new person when they moved in. It was possible that the incident had never even happened at all and their landlady had merely started the tale and let it spread and grow and mutate into what it was now. Since the house had grown more into being a student house, the landlady had moved out into her own much smaller house that she presumably did not have to share with anyone other that her three cats. These three cats were rather boringly called Ginger, Tabby and Socks, even though little Ginger, the youngest of the bunch having been a parting gift from an affectionate tenant at the end of her final year of university, was herself both ginger and a tabby. Presumably her distinct fur colour was enough to distinguish her name wise from the cat whose brown tabby markings had inspired his name.
Nell arrived back in her bedroom and went over to her record player with her earthenware mug still in hand. She dropped the needle down at the very start of the record and then went back over to her bed, placed the steaming mug on the bed side table. She crawled under several layers of blankets and with her cup of tea clasped in both of her hands, she sat back against a pile of pillows and the head board and Nell let herself be drawn once again into the music.
