Teen Interview: It Ain’t Over Until the Perfect Troll Face Sings

July 30, 2012 | Coleen Patrick

It’s summer–schools are empty, teens are scarce–on vacation, at camp, or ~~watching YouTube videos~~ working summer jobs . . .

but Reader Paparazzi ~ my Q & A series featuring teen readers ~ must go on. I spend a lot of time inside the mind of fictional teens–writing and reading, so it’s great to get a little real YA world perspective to help with character inspiration or simply if you want to see what holds a teen’s interest.

what teens read interview

It’s research, not stalking.

If you missed any previous interviews, click here or on the tab in the header above.

For this interview, I’ve cornered a teen close to home.

Meet Gavin, or as I have a habit of calling him, “G.”

G is sixteen. He runs cross-country and track, sings in his school’s chorus and a capella club and is famous on the internet.

Well, sort of.

Have you heard of trolling, or better yet seen this face before?

G is the number one image on Google for the perfect troll face.

perfect troll face boy

A face only a mother could love . . .

but it’s hard to catch him NOT making faces:

I’m partial to this one:

A big hello to G!

So G, what makes you want to pick up a book to read?

It’s got to have something I can relate to.

What are you currently reading?

Moby Dick, for school.

Anything you relate to?

I don’t know, but reading this book is becoming AHABit.

I’m not sure if I believe you, but props on the pun.

What was the last book you read that wasn’t for school?

Try Not to Breathe by Jennifer R. Hubbard

Do you ever re-read books?

Yup. I like to flip through the Guinness Book of World Records and the World Atlas.

What was your favorite book when you were younger?

Captain Underpants and Harry Potter

Favorite subject in school?

Spanish

Least favorite?

History

What would you like to learn how to do—that you don’t know how to do?

Learn more languages—like Swedish and German.

Okay, I received some questions from YA writers curious about teen relationships (ie dating). What do you think is the most challenging thing about relationships?

Being yourself.

What was the last movie you saw?

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Favorite tv show or movie you can watch again and again?

The Invention of Lying

Tell me three songs you’re listening to on your iPod:

The More I See You ~ Michael Buble

The Way You Look Tonight ~ Michael Buble

Flavour ~Bare Noize

What’s your favorite snack?

Veggie straws

What did you eat for breakfast?

Nothing because I’m fasting for the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’ Av, but yesterday for breakfast I ate Frosted Cheerios.

I’m so hungry can we please not talk about food?

Okay, no more food talk. 🙂

Some quick-fire fill in the blanks:

I fear change.

I need clarity.

I hate homework.

I love singing.

So here’s a tiny snippet of G doing what he loves:

Thanks G!

Do you have any questions you want answered by teens in future Q & As? Or a question for Gavin? Let me know in the comments.

If not, how would you answer this quick fire fill in the blank? I need _____. (Seeing as it’s now Monday morning, I NEED COFFEE!)

Thanks! I love it when you comment. 🙂

Have a great week!

The Hulking Generation Gap

January 9, 2012 | Coleen Patrick

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I were playing a trivia board game with our fifteen year old son. Our son is a bit competitive and usually beats us when it comes to geography and presidential history, but he wasn’t so happy when he pulled this card:

Name a character from Hogan’s Heroes.

“Come on,” he said sounding annoyed. “I don’t watch this reality TV stuff . . .ugh, okay fine, Hulk Hogan.”

An American TV show featuring spandex clad wrestler, Hulk Hogan, in charge of a crew of Allied prisoners in a POW camp?

My husband and I laughed, but it was an honest mistake considering Hogan’s Heroes started airing before we were all born. But the next time we played that game, this card came up:

Name a comic character Johnny Carson played on The Tonight Show.

My son’s response?

“Who’s Johnny Carson?”

It was a little astonishing that he didn’t have any reference for the thirty year host of The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson was such a fixture in my house from the time I was a kid until right before I got married.

Generation Gap: A chasm, amorphously situated in time and space, that separates those who have grown up absurd from those who will, with luck, grow up absurd.

**~Bernard Rosenberg, Dictionary for the Disenchanted, 1972**

You know what else is absurd? My kids don’t know what a library card catalog is . . .

The card catalog and paper–the two things I needed to do a school report when I was a kid. No Google.

And (*sigh*) they don’t even know how to use a cassette tape, the pain of it unraveling, or the power of a pencil in that respect.

Both my kids do however know the 17th century stockade:

Captive in Colonial Williamsburg

This is one way to bridge the generation gap.

However, I am grateful that my kids know not only what a library is, but the feel and smell of actual books. That even though they listen to their music via iPods, I am happy that they know the power of music.

So they may not know the once famous fixtures of bygone decades, but I am glad that they find some significance in their family–at least enough to sit down with them and play a game.

There is nothing wrong with today’s teenager that twenty years won’t cure. ~Author Unknown

What gaps do you see in the generation before or after you?

Guest Post at Jessica O’Neal

December 23, 2011 | Coleen Patrick

Happy Friday!

I am guest posting at writer Jessica O’Neal’s blog. Jessica has a fantastic site with reviews on TV, books and movies and she is a big fan of Glee and Harry Potter. She is currently writing a fantasy novel. Check out her site here.

Have a wonderful weekend and Happy Holidays. See you in the new year!
I leave you with a Christmas carol from my son’s winter chorus concert. He’s the tenor solo in the first forty seconds ;).

When Words Fail, Eat More Friggin’ Pudding

December 7, 2011 | Coleen Patrick

The year was 19 something or other. I was a teenager, sitting on a diving board over my best friend’s pool and singing along to some tunes playing from her boom box (“boom box” might narrow down the year).

“Um, what are you singing?” my BF asked from her floating lounge chair.

“The song.” (I’m missing a Duh here, but I’m trying to maintain the historical accuracy.)

She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Let me hear it again.”

I shrugged, waited for the chorus and then sang, “Ew ba ba leeba. Ewwww, ba ba leeba!”

I continued belting out a few more ba leeba’s even though my BF was laughing at me. You see the actual lyric is “Smooth operator, smooooth operator.” (You’re now one Google away from the year).

Anyway, that was the moment that I realized I am terrible with deciphering lyrics, and of course it didn’t end with the “ew ba ba leebas.” I’ve been screwing up lyrics for decades. Just a couple of months ago I found myself asking my teenage son about a song on the radio. I’d been singing it for a couple of weeks and wanted to know what the artist meant by, “I used to ball on my chicks.”

My son looked at me like I’d just farted. In front of his friends. And then he put his iPod headphones back into his ears.

Well I thought it was an honest question, because I can’t always be up on this generation’s vocabulary, right?

Wrong.

Turns out that lyric has nothing to do with balls or chicks. It’s “I used up all of my tricks.” Oh and the song title? “Cooler than me.”

Here I am singing, completely clueless to the lyrics and the effect of denim on denim.

Maybe I screw up the lyrics, because I love to write fiction–I’m more prone to making stuff up. I don’t know, but I do know that words are pretty important to me. Maybe the words are rebelling against me because of all the manipulating I put them through.

That would explain why I sometimes have trouble coming up with a word. Here’s me in the middle of a conversation at dinner last night: “What’s the word? It means looking up to something or holding it in high regard?”

“Envy?” A dear and very patient member of my family asked.

“No, it’s something positive . . . VALUE! Yes, value, that’s what I was trying to say.”

Did I mention I once screwed up the words to Smash Mouth’s All Star? It was the line about not being the sharpest tool in the shed.

But I’m not alone.

You can check out an entire archive of misheard lyrics here at Kiss this Guy.

Here are just a few:

Abba’s Dancing Queen: “See that girl, watch her scream, kicking the dancing queen.”

Joan Jett’s I Love Rock n Roll: “I love rock and roll, put another dime in the juice box baby.”

John Newton’s Amazing Grace: “That saved a wench like me.”

Yikes.

But my all time favorite is from We Wish You a Merry Christmas: “Now bring us some friggin’ pudding.”

And it’s even funnier with visuals.

Do words ever fail you?

Novel Inspiration

November 2, 2011 | Coleen Patrick

It’s the second week of the Warm Fuzzies Blogfest and the talented Juliana Brandt has offered up another task:

“This week, we’ll cater to those of us who are completely possessive over our WIPs (work in progress) and don’t want to give anything too telling away. Instead of posting something intimate about our writing, post a picture or piece of music that describes your WIP.

What do you look to when you write? What inspires you? How else do you use your creativity? Music? Pictures? Art?”

When I write, I often have a playlist. Here is a music video (and lyrics) for one of the more influential songs in my contemporary YA WIP (the one in the editing stages, NOT my NaNo project).

So let me know what you think my story is about!

LULLABY by SIA

Send a wish upon a star
Do the work and you’ll go far
Send a wish upon a star
Make a map and there you are

Send a hope upon a wave
A dying wish before the grave
Send a hope upon a wave
For all the souls you failed to save

And you stood tall
Now you will fall
Don’t break the spell
Of a life spent trying to do well
And you stood tall
Now you will fall
Don’t break the spell
Of a life spent trying to do well

Send a question in the wind
It’s hard to know where to begin
So send the question in the wind
And give an answer to a friend

Place your past into a book
Put in everything you ever took
Place your past into a book
Burn the pages let them cook

FREE TO BE YOU AND ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA

August 5, 2011 | Coleen Patrick

This week I saw Maroon 5, Train and Gavin DeGraw in concert. It was an awesome show, especially because we had great seats (I was surprised, I must have read that online seating chart upside down). Being close to the stage, I could feel the music working its way up through my feet, plugging me into all that energy. Plus I love watching people do what they love to do, to see them in the middle of what they created.

It feels like a real connection.

I could see the sheen on Adam Levine

But one of Train’s lyrics kept tapping at me, “reminds me that there’s room to grow,” and I started thinking . . . about connections and Twitter and this blog and Facebook, um and writing and growth and fear and then Eleanor Roosevelt’s quotes on courage like this one: you must do the things you think you cannot do.

*deep breath*

Okay so maybe that wasn’t exactly what Train imagined when they wrote that line (although Twitter was mentioned plenty up on the stage), but social media can be a little scary. When I started on Twitter, it was one small tweet for Twitter, but one giant leap for me.

Mostly because it was a change.

Is there anyone out there, ’cause it’s getting harder and harder to breathe

It’s funny how easy it is to resist change, because give me a movie, magazine or talk show with a makeover to see and I am all over that. Then again I once resisted getting a cell phone, because I thought my handy dandy pager was oh so much better (yes I said pager). I was just used to it.

It was easier, or so i thought.

Now I’m not saying my cellphone led me to a feeling of Zen, peace and serenity, (although there might be an app for that), but it was one of those “leap” things.
Every time I tweet, blog, leave a comment on someone’s site, or a lurker’s comment on my husband’s Facebook (I’m still not on it–I know, 750 million people can’t be wrong, but baby steps people), I wonder:

Am I doing this right?

I don’t know. Maybe.

The thing is the Internet always comes across to me as so virtual, but it is real life, real people. So if that’s true, then how do I be me in this virtual but not virtual place?

I don’t want to be anything other than me

Because being online is different than say meeting someone at school or a party or work, or even what you get from being at a live concert, but whether you’re out in public or on the couch in your pajamas, it seems like we are all still showing up for the same reason:

Connection.

And that can be one of those important things that reminds us “there’s room to grow,” because we get to discover people living out their goals and dreams and vacations and children and books and music, and hopefully find a little inspiration for our own lives.

Then, what do you know, along comes change.

WHAT’S YOUR HAPPY SONG?

August 1, 2011 | Coleen Patrick

This weekend I took a little road trip to take my son to camp. With nothing on the radio, I dug around and came up with a cassette. It had no artist cover, just my loopy, teenage handwriting all over the paper liner.
Yes, it was a mix tape.
From 1987.
So I popped it in the player and started to sing (while my son pushed his headphones deeper into his ears). I found myself thinking about the power of music, and I don’t just mean the power that is remembering lyrics from a 25 year old song (although that is pretty amazing especially when I can’t always remember why I walked into a room), no I’m talking about the power it has to give you a boost.

I GOT A FEELING
Music improves your mood. It can make you happy, make you want to dance or inspire you. Some of the top happy, upbeat songs (they say so in the title) are:

Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t worry be happy “
U2’s “Beautiful day”
Don McLean’s “American Pie” (okay, so it doesn’t exactly say it in the title, but the song rocks and who doesn’t love pie?)
Or this oldie, but goodie:

Even that outfit makes me smile

GLORY DAYS
Music not only evokes emotion, but memory. Forget the beat or the lyrics, sometimes a song can lift you up simply because it reminds you of a happy moment.

For me a big one is the day my fourth grade teacher passed out the slightly damp, freshly copied lyrics to “We will rock you” and “We are the champions.” We all sniffed the paper (ah, remember those days?) and then sang along to Queen, slapping our palms to our desk to the beat (Mrs. Fearn rocked).

COME TOGETHER
Music brings people together. Think about the last concert you went to, wasn’t it amazing singing along with thousands of people to one song?

But it doesn’t have to be that big.

I can also think about dancing in my room to Club Nouveau’s “Lean on Me” with my sister B (small favors that the recording technology was not as accessible as it is today).
Or, there’s the synthesized beats of a-ha that will always remind me of high school. And Jimmy Buffet will always make me think of college and singing with everyone at Sully’s (including my future husband).

Then there was this song that reminds me of going to parties. To this day it makes me want to turn it up and scream along (even if I’m still not sure what it’s about).

Yes, whether the song is cool or cheesy, it can lead to happy connections.

DON’T STOP BELIEVING
Everybody loves a song that can lift your mood, empower you or even make you feel like a superhero, as it apparently did for Henry David Thoreau:

“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”

(And he lived in a cabin in the woods for 2 years!)

Who doesn’t want to listen to a song that makes you feel like that?

Whether you prefer the original or one of the many covers, here’s a rocking, positive song (so good it apparently summed up the entire six seasons of HBO’s Sopranos).

What is your happy song?