Sunday, November 6, 2005

It's only a little less of what you thought it was.

Good God, I love Robert Ludlum. *just finished The Bourne Ultimatum* <333 And only one or two of my favorite characteres died, haha. Gah. Speaking of my winning choices in favorite characters... Spoilers beyond for last nights Fullmetal Alchemist episode: NOOOO! GREED! WHY! WHY!!!! GREEEEEEEED! Other than the aforementioned death, there was another one that happened sometime recently, though I'm having trouble remembering who it was, heh. Let's see. Last week was Alexa's birthday party and so much stuff went on there I can't even remember it all. To name a few things at least: Discussion of devirginization. Playing of Whose Lind is it Anyway. Prank fucking phone calls(I'll go into details here in a moment, at least). Drawing contest. REHAB(not even going into it...). HOOKERS(don't ask. I had no part in it, though. I was the bodyguard =D). DIRTY TALKING WHILE IN A TUBE-LIKE STRUCTURE AT FUCKING BURGER KING. Yes. The latter was quite fun. It was very small in there and Alexa and I somehow both fit onto one of the ledges and started talking about so many sexually explicit things. Her younger brother sat on the ledge above us for a little while, and I asked him if he was a heterosexual. He said no. *snickers and moves on* Okay. The prank phone calls. We called just about everyone we could think of, using the phone book to get their numbers. Take note that we were doing this at around midnight. After the football game(which our school one. Whoo! But then...we lost this past Friday. ;_; If we could have won, we would have went to the regionals. Oh well. Fulton's gonna lose next week, as Lonnie says and when it comes to football, I trust Lonnie lol.) Key moments: "No, he's not here and don't you ever fucking call here again!" "Yeah?" "TACOS! *hang up*" "Is Cameron there?" "No." *hang up* "Is Cameron there?" "No." *hang up* "Is Cameron there?" "He's not going to be back for awhile." *hang up* "Is this Kayla?" "NO! *slams phone down*" Good fun. I wanna play Splinter Cell. Really bad. Only I don't have it with me, it's at home. At my mom's house... *sighs* God I want to play it so bad right now. You know what I love doing? Using words that I've never used before and I'm not real sure of the definition so I'll use them in a sentence, then look them up afterward and discover that I used the word correctly. Point and case: Convoluted and tangible. I was writing in Memory(you know that story I thought of from that one dream I had a reeeeaaaallllyyyy long time ago? Yeah.) and I was trying to think of a word for twisted, confusing, something along that line. Then convoluted popped into my head. Now, I've seen the word used and figured out its meaning via context clues, but I've never actually used it before and I wasn't sure if the context I was using it in was correct. So I finished up the sentence with convoluted in it and used WordPerfect's dictionary to get the meaning. I used it perfectly. It was just the word I needed and I used it correctly. A few minutes later, I typed in another word I'd never used before and wasn't sure I was using right. Tangible. And in the context I used it, it worked. Ms. Mott says I'm a good suspense writer. Well, she said this awhile ago, but I've only just now began to think about it. I don't even try to write suspensefully. It just happens. It comes naturally for me. All the suspenseful intrigue and...well, suspense. Some people have trouble writing suspense and I can't understand why because it comes so easily for me. And while on the subject of writing...heh. I'm on the verge of doing another rewrite of La Cosa Nostra. Nothing drastic. Just going back through it and tweaking the dialogue. How La Cosa Nostra's written now is just one of those little things that irks me. With La Cosa Nostra, I feel like I can do so much better. And I know I can. I just need to sit my ass down and get to it. I know my dialogue writing has evolved a lot since I started avidly writing in sixth grade...but some of the dialogue in La Cosa Nostra just makes me feel as if I've backtracked, lost progress instead of made progress. If I had to, I'd split up my stages of writing into four categories: sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade and high school. Sixth grade: the beginning of my writing obsession. I had some good ideas, spent quite a few nights up late just writing, technically, it was a great start for me. What I was writing was the best that I could write at that time. I was really just happy I could finally write something without constant sound effects(I went through this weird little phase in the fifth grade where whatever I wrote, I couldn't write it without adding stupid sound effects in it. I didn't want to write the sound effects, they just kind of wrote themselves and sounded pretty stupid, too. I can't explain it. Mostly stuff like splat, squish, squirt, etcetera.). Seventh grade: The summer beforehand was completely dedicated to writing and this helped to improve my writing to its next level. It still wasn't great, but for me, it was better than my best had been. I knew my writing wasn't great, that it paled in comparison to what professionals were writing...but it was phenominally better than my classmates writing. Progressing through seventh grade, my writing made more improvements, I had more ideas...I entered into about my ninth or tenth notebook. Killed off a major character in a horrible twist of fate...then did something that only I could fathom to have come up with... Yes. Seventh grade was inspirational. If I didn't have Xio there to read my story, give me feedback, ask me so many questions(mostly about the beginning of the story as she started somewhere in the middle.), I'm not sure where I'd be. Nowhere, I suppose. (© Kayla Neff 2005. "Nowhere, I suppose" is my copyrighted catchphrase...) Eighth grade: Thus begins the highlight of my road to a successful writing career. A drastic change in my writing happened over the summer and the challenges of eighth grade continued to improve and build upon it. My dialogue began to take on more shape. A new style of writing happened itself upon me. No longer did things sound juvenile, but were beginning to sound as mature as the story called for. Ideas were coming to me in droves and Xio began demanding that I write. And as all stories must end, thus did come the official ending of the main storyline of La Cosa Nostra. Ah, yes. Part 2 ended (literally) with a bang and Xio beat me up because of the horrible thing I did. Fuck happy endings. They're overrated anyway. And with the end came the beginning. The beginning of Part 3, the side stories and extras of La Cosa Nostra. After Story Extras, Into the Past, WSCNH(Would, Should and Could Never Happen). Wonderful. (I'll mention now...I'm very happy with all of the After Story Extras and Into the Pasts. The WSCNHs are just silly little extras and only there for comedic relief. I love them all, but I love ASE and ITP more.) High School: Maybe a long writing stinge over the summer helped me to consider my writing style and build upon it, change it and revamp it. I don't know. Something happened, though. Maybe all of the stress and annoyances gave me a new look on things and allowed me to change how I was doing things, how I was writing. Lord knows I matured even more this past summer than I ever have before. And I've always had more maturity than my peers...even people years and years older than me. And, of course, with my new, increased maturity comes my larger sense of immaturity. (The most immature mature person and dumbest smart person, that I am and therefore called.) So my mind's drowning itself in the gutter and my writing has this new flair to it that I really like. I feel as if I've come so far since sixth grade, that the things irking me about La Cosa Nostra, the things I find regressive in the writing, makes me fearful that I'm beginning to lose it. That all the progress I've made over the last few years has been for nothing and I'm slowly falling back down the steep slope of achievement, only to hit the bottom hard and break my back. And with this metaphorical back breaking comes the breaking of my spirit. Nothing's the same. I can't match what I used to write so recently and then my mind snaps and I can't take it. And another stint begins until I finally bring myself back, starting over. The road of improvement before me again. The steep slope to achievement at the end, years into the future. Because my writing style is maturing and changing, because I fear the regression I see in La Cosa Nostra, it must be changed. If not, I have a feeling I'll give it up all together. I'll finish the sequel, stack all of the notebooks in a box and place them into my closet, happy to have closed that chapter of my life. Glad to know that the story that shaped and reshaped my way of writing is finally finished. Nothing left to do but to work on more original works of fiction. La Cosa Nostra is a mix of my own twisted sense of fiction, of reality and the reality that Rockstar Games has created for us in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. The places remain the same near the beginning, but change as cities will do and must do as time goes on. There are names you may recognize but if you've come to La Cosa Nostra expecting the same personalities and traits of the characters they're modeled after, leave. Leave now. The story has progressed so much farther from what it was, the characters changed so dramatically that almost nothing remains of the original characters I modeled them after. Just the names. Only the names. Something had to give, and something did. It was never my intention to stay true to the characters they share names with. Because that's all it is. A sharing of names. Other than that...have fun picking through each character and finding phenominal similarities between them. I personally don't want to. La Cosa Nostra will be undergoing changes soon. Some dramatic. Some not. Mostly the horrid dialogue I feel I've written and the restructuring of paragraphs I'm not satisfied with. I'm overall disappointed with how most things are laid out and how they've been written. There are some things I love and that will not change. Unfortunately, I can't say what they are. That's ruin the surprise. Not to mention, no one other than myself has read the parts of the story I won't change. I'm not talking about the rough draft in my notebooks. Not about the second draft found on the nostalgia page of La Cosa Nostra's site. But the third draft of La Cosa Nostra, Part one, Chapter one, found on my laptop. With the fourth draft of La Cosa Nostra, part one, chapter one, will come a redesign of the La Cosa Nostra site. Kayla feels philosophical. Good day and good night. -Kayla

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