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Teen Talk - The Alien Language

2/28/2011

Speaking to a teen can sometimes feel like speaking to an Alien. I came across this article and found it entertaining and informative in helping me bridge that gap. This could be the Rosetta Stone for learning to talk Teen!

Enjoy.
Charlie
C.K. Volnek

Understanding Modern American Teen Slang
By Angela Pichon

Teens may seem to speak a different language. Find out what they are saying.

Most parents want to be able to communicate with their teens. Communication can be nearly impossible when the parent has no idea what her teenager is saying. This article lists some popular slang terms teens and young adults use. This article is to inform and it is not advised that parents actually use this slang as doing so could further keep the teen from talking. Use this article as a tool to decode a teen's seemingly cryptic speech.

Teen Talk A-F Parents may be baffled when their teens talk about "apple bottom" and "cheese". Check out what these really means.

Apple Bottom – A girl with an attractively big, round butt.
Blunt – A cigar hollowed out and filled with marijuana
Badonkadonk – An expression for an extremely curvacious female behind.
Brown out – To forget something until it is later mentioned due to drinking. Less intense than blacking out.
Baked – High on Marijuana
Cheese – Slang term for money.
Creeper – A person who does weird things.
Cake – Slang for a large amount of Cocaine. Also slang for money.
Dime – A very attractive person. Also slang for 10 dollars worth of any drug.
Emo – Emotional often used as an insult.
E – Shortened form of Ecstasy
Fag – A slang term for a homosexual male. Also used as an insult to someone thought to be stupid.
Frontin – To put up a facade.

Teen Talk G-M Some parents may be familiar with "LOL", but they probably won't know that the single letter "G" can mean a few other things too!

G – A gangster. A thousand dollars. A term of endearment.
Hater – A person that cannot be happy for another person's success so they make a habit of pointing out flaws.
Holla – A phrase used to acknowledge the presence of a friend. A guy showing interest in a girl. To call on the phone.
Holla Back Girl – A girl willing to treated like a doormat by guys.
Jacked – Slang for Stolen.
Juice – Respect and credibility on the street.
Juggalo – A fan of the band Insane Clown Posse or other bands on the same label.
Kicks – Slang term for shoes.
Keep it real – To be yourself.
LOL – Laugh out loud. Used most often when instant messaging.
Money – High quality.
My bad – Slang for my mistake.

Teen Slang N-R Whether to describe something cool or to be the made a laughing stock, teenagers have their own terms for those as well.

Off the chain – Very cool
Owned – To be made a fool of.
OMG – Oh my God.
Prep – A teen that conforms to typical teen behavior.
Props – Proper respect
ROFL – Rolling on the floor laughing.

Teen Slang S-Z Teens can be very creative with words at times. Just take a look at some of the terms and the meanings to see the connections between the words.

Sick – Cool
Swag – Appearance or style.
Sexting – Sexually explicit text messaging.
Tool – A cretin.
Tramp stamp – A tattoo above a woman's behind.
Trippin – To overreact.
Trolling – Purposefully being antagonistic on the internet.
Uber – The ultimate
User – A person who uses a friend.
V card – Virginity
WoW – Acronym for World of Warcraft.

This is by no means a complete list of modern slang. But hopefully this will hopefully help us communicate with teens better.

Http://www.suite101.com/content/teen-talk-a194416

3 Comments

Three Things To Remember

2/21/2011

4 Comments

I recently had the great fortune of hearing a powerful young man speak. The man was Curtis Tomasevich, a member of the USA Bobsled team that received the gold medal at the 2010 Olympics. He’s a local celebrity from Shelby, Nebraska, a little town in the middle of nowhere, population 670. But Curt sang great accolades to his home town. He credited them for allowing his dream to become reality. Before becoming a gold medal winner, he was a struggling athlete with monumental financial needs in order to make it to the Olympics. Without a medal, he was just another guy, competing as a member of a bobsled team. No sponsorships, no job, no rich relatives.

At a plea from Curt’s parents, his townsfolk went to work. They held benefits and street dances to raise money for Curt. While Curt’s teammates were happy to broadcast their metropolitan home towns were raising a few thousand dollars for their needs, Curt blushed as he revealed that his family and friends had raised over $25,000. Yes, you read it right. Over twenty-five thousand dollars! Aren’t family and friends great?

As Curt continued his talk, I couldn’t help but grasp onto his ‘three things to remember.’ He said…

1 - Remember where you came from. (for obvious reasons for Curt.)

2 - Remember where you are now. (he stressed this as he feels one needs to look at themselves and see what needs to be fixed so you can move forward.)

3 - Remember where you want to be. (with the dream in mind, you can focus on what it takes to get there.)

I have posted these three simple statements by my computer to remember them. Though not in the exact words as Curt expressed, these three small statements are very endearing to me.

1 – Remember where you came from. For me, where I came from is to remember who my family is, my friends, those that helped me on my way. Remembering my struggles. Remembering my accomplishments. For all this past made me the person I am today. If I hadn’t experienced that pain, if I hadn’t felt that joy, I’d be a totally different person for it. Embracing my past, good and bad, and rejoice in the person I am. There is no one else like me.

2 – Remember where you are now. This is one I sometimes forget. I think about the past, I think of the future…but I forget about the present. I forget to be thankful for the very moment I am living, for the things I have, and for the things I don’t. But I must remember the present, for that is what it is…a present, the gift of life, the beginning of my future.

3 – Remember where you want to be. I can’t help but smile as I think of this one. Everyone needs a dream, something to go after with all your heart and soul. I, myself, always dreamed of writing novels. But life got in the way for the longest time. I pushed my dream aside, but I never threw it away. After many years, I pulled that dream back out, dusted it off and got to work. Now, I have three middle-grade novels under contract an working on about four more. I think of what my life would have been like if I’d given up on my dream of writing. I can’t even imagine. Maybe I would have found another dream, but I would have missed out on the joy I feel when I open my soul to my fingers. And the giddiness I felt when I signed my first contract.

These ‘three things to remember’ are a wonderful tribute from Curt Tomasevich. And to me, they merge into every aspect of my life, from my job to my family to my home town. I even find these three things influencing my writing. Without these three things my writing would never be where it is now.

1. Past - I write from my experiences of the past. Happy, sad, good, bad, flavoring my stories with emotion. My characters flow from the people that have left their imprint on my life. I couldn’t write without my past and no one can write my stories because no one has ever been where I’ve been.

2. Present - There is no time like the present to create. But when my muse is blasting story after story and my fingers just aren’t keeping up or my internal editor is telling me I’m no good, it can be easy to give up and stop trying. This is my weakness, the flaw I see in my present. I must fix it…now…so I can move on to my future.

3. Future - I dream of my future, of writing that next novel that will truly touch my reader’s heart; to write a book my reader just can’t put down; to write something to make my reader feel good about themselves or about the world we live in. Without my dream, my desire, I am just a body, going through the day to day motions, ever searching. But with that dream, I have a direction, steering me to even more joy as I fulfill what I believe I’ve been created to do.

So relish who you are, where you came from and where you are going. Seize the day and celebrate. for there is only one you. Keep your dreams alive and go after them. Few are born with natural talent, but many are talented because they believed in their dream and did what they had to do to make it come true.

May all your dreams come true!
C.K. Volnek

4 Comments

A Search Engine for Writers

2/15/2011

7 Comments

I'm borrowing a great article from Elizabeth Spann Craig that I thought writers would enjoy. You can find her original post here... http://mysterywritingismurder.blogspot.com/2011/01/search-engine-for-writers.html

I hope you enjoyed the site as much as I did! Great tools and links.
Thanks for stopping by!
C.K. Volnek

Writer’s Knowledge Base - http://hiveword.com/wkb/search

Google doesn’t always deliver.

If you want to search for information on POV, try plugging the term into Google.

The top sites returned for POV are a video that PBS made (which isn’t on writing POV), a couple of definitions by Wikipedia (several of which have to do with automobiles), a racy YouTube video, and some freeware.

That’s right—nothing to do with the craft of writing.

When I started subscribing to writing blogs, I did it to access in-depth information on the writing craft—written by working writers and industry professionals.

After amassing a huge (1587 and growing) number of writing blog subscriptions, it occurred to me that other writers might be interested in the same type of information….and that maybe they didn’t know where to look.

That’s when I started tweeting the info I found.

Realizing that not everyone was on Twitter, I started sharing the links, weekly, on my blog.

Still, the fact that the links weren’t easily searched bothered me. What if there was a writer who didn’t need that great link on book marketing now? Maybe they needed an agent post on penning the perfect query. Would they just miss out on the marketing link since they wouldn’t need it for a while? Would they bookmark it for later and end up with a ton of bookmarks?

I put a couple of pages up on my blog to try to archive the links and make them, to some degree, searchable. Still, the searching wasn’t particularly efficient.

I mentioned on my blog one day, “I’m sure there’s got to be a better way to do this, but I can’t think of it.”

Enter Mike Fleming, software engineer.

Mike knew exactly how to make the links searchable—create a specific search engine for writing links. He emailed me to bat the idea back and forth with me (actually, it was more of a one-sided tennis game, since he’s way over my head in terms of technology.)

But I loved the idea of a free resource for writers. A way for writers to access information that would help them write better books or articles.

After a lot of work on Mike’s part, the Writer’s Knowledge Base was created.

As Mike stated on his blog:

The search is done instantly over thousands of writing-related articles ranging from character development to author promotion on social media. Unlike Google, all of the results are relevant to you as a writer. They may not all interest you, of course, but at least searching for "plot" will bring back articles on how to plot your story and not news articles on terrorist plots.

Mike has also included a fun feature where a writer can browse the links and find random writing-related articles.

Who are the authors of these blog posts? Writers, agents, editors, book marketing experts. Some of your blog posts may be included, too. Writers won’t only be accessing the information they need, but they’ll also be finding new and helpful blogs to follow. And Mike will continue adding the links that I uncover each week.

When you have a minute, we’d love for you to give it a try. What do you think? Please tell us what you like, what you’d like to see added, and any ideas or thoughts you have. You can comment on either of our blogs, email me at elizabethspanncraig (at) gmail.com or Mike at mike.fleming (at) hiveword.com.

And feel free to spread the news. I’d love for this to be a real resource for writers.
Writer’s Knowledge Base - http://hiveword.com/wkb/search

7 Comments

Real Life Experience

2/7/2011

2 Comments

I love a book that pulls you into the story and makes you feel like you are right there, experiencing the events with the main character, making it feel like a real life experience. And real life is about expecting the unexpected. Now I can add a new real life experience of my own to my writing. Three weeks ago, I slipped and became another victim of the Nebraska ice, breaking my wrist and requiring surgery to implant a plate. (Guess I’m going to become great friends with the TSA people at the airport now.)

I know I should feel fortunate. It could have been worse. It was just my wrist…my right wrist…and of course, I’m right handed. And I admit, it has made me see the world in a whole new light. I felt helpless, like a baby, unable to do so many things for myself. Taking a bath and washing my hair with my right hand stuck up to stay clear of the water is really hard! I had to ask for help in doing the simplest of things like opening a can of pop, buttoning my jeans, and cutting up my sandwich. I was not going to be winning any beauty pageants since using a curling iron was out of the question. And it’s really difficult to draw a straight line with eye-liner with your left hand.

But I have learned I can do many things with my left hand. I can cook stir fry…sort of. Needless to say, my husband about split a gut when he came into the kitchen to find my pan spinning on the stove as I tried to stir it. And adding the sauce to the mix? Yeah, I had to improvise by holding the packet in my mouth and squeezing it with my left hand. But hey, I did it. And I've learned to type fairly fast with my left hand. Hunt and peck and taken on a whole new meaning.

I hope I never have to experience a break like this again, but I can now empathize with my characters as they deal with injuries and add real life experience to their stories. What real life experiences do you bring to your characters?

Thanks for stopping by.
C.K. Volnek

2 Comments

Teen Talk - The Alien Language

Three Things To Remember

A Search Engine for Writers

Real Life Experience

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