Friday, May 21, 2010

Grab-bag: Friday Literary Links & Dialects

This is the 100th Speak Coffee post in 2010!

Ohmygod I love this cartoon.

Ohmygod, I hate when people say -- aloud -- "oh-em-gee." %*&@! Just say the real fucking phrase would you?! Understand the origin of the phrase is words that have been abbreviated down to letters, not letters that have any meaning on their own. Besides, when you say it you sound like a asinine 16 year-old girl. So unless you are asinine, or sixteen, please restrain yourself.

Since we're on dialect, I'll confess that mine is now dated -- I don't talk like a YA author on Twitter or like the YA audience that they're writing toward whom I've also seen using this lingo on line. My biggest dating feature: I don't call anything "epic." I'm much more likely to say "X was uber-successful" than "X was epic." Epic and uber are not entirely interchangeable in their slang usages but alas I'm dated. Use of uber = totally obvious that I went to college in the 00's not the 10's (gasp!). I don't write awesomesauce blog posts made of win, just the occasional kickass one.

In response to my post about the psycho intern applicant from hell, Rachele Alpine wrote a fake (thank god) query letter in the style of the would-be intern's psycho-ness.

I've come to realize that the compilation-blog is the new writer-blog. I've started following Writer Unboxed lately, which is great, and then a friend of mine launched Seven Sassy Sisters Blog with her writing group -- the Sassy Seven are all romance writers targeting different lines and imprints. When they started out as a critique group none of them were published, now it's a different story. Way to go ladies!

Highly Recommended