Can I Stay By Your Side? - Chapter 9

Gee, I realised that I never had a tag for "Can I Stay By Your Side". It's time to create one, I suppose?

And to make up for seven chapters that I've already posted, I'll put in some fun facts that I can't believe I didn't publish previously.

Fun fact #1: The original title that I really wanted to publish was "Soba ni ite ii?" which directly translated in Japanese is "Is it okay if you stay by my side?" but well, my lousy Japanese mistook the whole phrase and I reversed the meaning, hur hur. I may a decent writer but I'm still not a decent speaker of Japanese.

In other words, the title of this fanfic should have been "Can you stay by my side?" Hot damn! *knocks head against table in frustration*

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Let's move on to Chapter 9. Chapter 8, as we already know, was my author's note so let's skip that.

When I came back to review my chapter, I thought that it would be easy to just look through for grammatical errors and just upload this chapter.

How wrong I was.

Well, if you guys have not already found out, I actually enjoy reading my own stories. Yeah, I know. I'm really narcissistic at times. I have been rereading "I Want To Be A Turk", "Days of Exile", "The Only Exception" many times over the course of 2018, trying hard not to forget how enjoyable it was to write.

However, "Can I Stay By Your Side" was a story that I didn't particularly enjoy. Mainly, as I discovered last week when I had to reread the story for continuation, because the story was too skimpy for my liking.

"Can I Stay By Your Side" is written in the style of how a Japanese manga is written. Unfortunately, it's a disadvantage because illustrations play a huge role in manga. Thus, I realised that for the first seven chapters, I found my story too skimpy and lacking of details and "colour".

Thus, when I looked through the chapter again, a desire to improve it surged. Surprisingly, I made quite a lot of changes to the chapter. Mostly a rephrasing of previously written sentences, but also addition of some sentences to bring clarity to the context.

The scene of Yoshiko and Sana on the telephone was such an addition.

In the end, it turned out that my chapters exceeded 2800 words, which was way more than I had expected. However, I'm satisfied with the result.

To those who faithfully read KHR in tandem with my story, I commend your diligence and challenge you to find loopholes in my story (it ain't that difficult to do so anyway).

In order to portray a more accurate description of the Japanese culture, I often used terms in their original Japanese name. Hatsumoude is what the Japanese do in the new year. I've also used a number of websites for research and cross-reference, which I have listed below.

Alrighty, the writing gears are creaking slowly but surely. I'm ready.

Credits:
http://www.hellotokyo.jp/2011/01/02/hatsumode-new-years-visit-to-a-shrine/
http://www.hellotokyo.jp/2010/11/14/try-your-luck/
https://livejapan.com/en/article-a0000776/
http://www.fuji-travel-guide.com/news-item/sanpai/
https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/living-in-tokyo/religion/shrine-temple-manners/
https://wow-j.com/en/Allguides/other/tips_manners/00674_en/