The Truck Draft Has Landed
Jan192010
I know I’ve lax here but I’ve been on deadline. I can now tell you that the truck draft for Maybe This Time has been zapped to New York. The first 68,000 words are genius. The next 32,000 blow dead bears. Lani said she’d never heard that expression before but we used it all the time where I grew up went to college. Which probably tells you more about where I grew up went to college than you wanted to know. I must now go back and fix the dead-bear-blowing part, but at least we all know that if I get hit by a truck, there’s a book.
In the meantime, Lucy March’s blog rocks, and Cracked just did Seven Common Survival Tactics That Will Get You Killed, which is actually useful should you be attacked by a shark, bitten by a snake, or lost in the desert. Also, don’t miss the Six Creepiest Places on earth because they are genuinely creepy.
And now back to the DBBing 32,000.
Filed in Deep Thoughts, Writing
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45 Comments to 'The Truck Draft Has Landed'
On January 19, 2010 at 10:06 am JulieB said...
Glad to hear the big rig has left the bulding! Time for some sort of celebration, I would think.
On January 19, 2010 at 11:06 am JenK said...
I like to think that if you get hit by a truck, your final words will be Blow Dead Bears.
Such a heart warming expression.
On January 19, 2010 at 11:49 am robena grant said...
Yay! Confetti toss!
My new book poops piglets.
On January 19, 2010 at 12:48 pm Beki said...
I’m cackling over the blows dead bears. Rich is going to love that. I’m just happy there’s a book out there eventually coming my way!
On January 19, 2010 at 1:25 pm Sure thing said...
Congratulations on the genius part, commiserations on the blow dead bears part. Thanks for the update.
On January 19, 2010 at 1:34 pm TerriO said...
I’ve never heard that phrase either, and I grew up in southeast Ohio. But my steelmill town isn’t known for witty, imaginative people. I think the pollution stunts our brains.
Congrats!
On January 19, 2010 at 2:56 pm Shangrila said...
That saying is HILARIOUS! We said, “sucks like a hoover” which is nowhere near as funny!
On January 19, 2010 at 4:18 pm Naked Under My Clothes said...
Wait…isn’t that a GOOD thing? Don’t you WANT the Hoover to suck?
On January 21, 2010 at 1:48 pm MJ said...
DH says “blows dead donkeys.” Because he’s all about alliteration.
On January 19, 2010 at 3:50 pm Mary Stella said...
All the chat about potential titles and nobody ever suggested Blows Dead Bears? *g* I never heard that exact phrase either, but I’ve heard variations like blows chunks.
A personal favorite of mine is sucks like a hooker late on rent.
If the truck draft is done, does this mean you’re semi-finished? Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
On January 19, 2010 at 4:06 pm Jenny said...
The truck draft means the book is semi-finished.
I LOVE that.
On January 19, 2010 at 4:39 pm Kira said...
Semi-finished, LOL! And I don’t even like puns.
Jenny, could you please explain the thing with the bears? Because I’ve got two possible mental images, and neither one of them is working
On January 19, 2010 at 5:26 pm Lucy said...
I’ll take this one, Jenny.
Kira – take your two mental images, and the one that’s truly repulsive – THAT’s it.
On January 19, 2010 at 10:39 pm Jenny said...
Thank you, Lucy.
It’s good to know you’ll always go that extra mile into the gutter for me.
On January 19, 2010 at 9:13 pm JulieB said...
@ Kira, I think one of those _must_ be right.
On January 20, 2010 at 5:55 am Micki said...
I, on the other hand, love puns, and I think that’s a truly fine one. My only regret is that I can’t show my appreciation in true punster fashion — with another one! That gets groans from eight counties . . . . Oh well, keep on truckin’.
On January 19, 2010 at 6:56 pm KellyJ said...
Hooray for the truck draft.
Yes, please explain the blowing dead bears thing… I’m from deep in the south and need some help understanding this.
On January 19, 2010 at 7:04 pm Jessie said...
I like Blow Dead Bears for a title. And maybe the heroine could be Tina, Lucy’s sister in Getting Rid of Bradley. She might say some thing like that and I always liked her and wanted to know what happened to her.
On January 19, 2010 at 8:47 pm Karen J. said...
“Blow Dead Bears” by Jennifer Crusie…. yeah, I’d buy that.
On January 19, 2010 at 9:16 pm Jill said...
If you Google “blow dead bears” you get this blog post. And the actual definition
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=that%20blows%20dead%20bears
On January 19, 2010 at 10:42 pm Jenny said...
It’s in the Urban Dictionary and it’s Canadian?
Oh, wait. I bet it wasn’t high school, it was college. I went to Bowling Green U in northwestern Ohio which is just a lake away from Canada. Lots of hockey. I bet that’s where I picked it up.
Well, I knew I hadn’t made it up. We said it all the time. Eh?
On January 20, 2010 at 2:07 pm Meredith B. said...
Wait, you went to BG? So did I! Oops. And now my Alma Mater is outed, and I know that I’ve made a few nearly-bitchy complaints about the English program I went through. Somehow I justified them by telling myself that theoretically they didn’t actually blacken anybody’s reputation because nobody here knew where I’d gone. So I would like to officially proclaim that I had three English professors whom I enjoyed very much and with whom I was able to have valid and valuable conversations, two of whom thought my contributions were valuable and one whom didn’t think they were shabby– and whom incidentally I would give a great deal to hear read Beowulf in beautifully accented Old English just one more time. And I swear that I will never tell you the actual names of all the rest.
But for the record, I don’t actually recall hearing anybody at BG say “blows dead bears.” I wonder which of the phrases we did use were Canadian, though?
On January 20, 2010 at 8:36 pm Jenny said...
My first English TA there told me I was a wonderful writer. The second one told me I was awful. So I became an art major.
I’m sure I picked it up at BG now that I think of it. But it was the end of the sixties and the people I hung out with were not, uh, scholars. You may have been hanging with a better class of people.
On January 21, 2010 at 12:44 am Meredith B. said...
I think that’s the way of it with most English programs. It’s all so subjective, damn it, and then they assign grades. Oh, well, lots of people probably adore BG’s English program. I adored certain points of it myself. And at least we now know which of your TAs was right. I hope that wherever they are, s/he knows that they were right. As for the people I hung out with– I don’t know about better. But they were mostly music majors, and fairly serious about their studies. Then I was fairly interoverted, and I was a Philosophy minor in addition to the Lit major, so you can imagine that most of my time was spent in the library or holed up somewhere “essaying”.
On January 27, 2010 at 4:37 pm Mombo said...
Wow, you’re bi-lingual. You speak Canadian.
On January 19, 2010 at 10:26 pm CrankyOtter said...
I will forgive any amount of laxity in blogging if it results in a new Crusie book. Awesome news about the truck draft even with the dead bear blowing part. I hope for you that you will be able to whip it into even-more-shareable shape with less stress than getting it to the truck draft state.
For what it’s worth (not much), I prefer the phrase “blows dead bears” to “just hell” any day of the week. It has actually cheered me up from my microsoft induced carpal tunnel misery (stupid ribbon and renaming everything) and I didn’t think that was possible. At least not overtly. My subconscious must have suspected as it sent me here.
On January 19, 2010 at 10:43 pm marly said...
“Blows dead bears” – that’s a great description… when you think about it, what would be worse? R. is in London this week and says he was befuddled hearing the term “Dog’s Bollocks”. It turns out to be Brit slang for something great. Evidently, that endearing trait when male dogs lick themselves is something to be envied. Not winning the lottery great, but up there. I have a horrible feeling I’m going to hear it a lot. On the up-side, the truck draft is done!!!!
On January 20, 2010 at 5:58 am Micki said...
(-: I dunno, blowing live bears could be worse, but on a different level. You’d survive the dead one, at least. Probably. Oh, I got it: blowing zombie bears.
On January 20, 2010 at 12:03 am Melissa Blue said...
Well the popular phrase I’ve learned to love can’t be printed in either polite or impolite society. But really after Blows Dead Bears I may switch.
Second, I’m becoming a fan of Marly.
On January 20, 2010 at 11:27 am marly said...
What a nice thing to say. I have an up-date from England. R. tells me if you hear a British fellow saying, “It’s the dog’s”, it’s the way to use the full phrase in polite company to say something is really good. Also, he was told to set his alarm at “sparrow’s fart”, or extremely early. Now that’s descriptive. He’s planning to work “Blows Dead Bears” into a conversation and thinks it will really impress the others at this afternoon’s meeting. He’s having a great time – has a room the size of a closet, but it has 2 flat-screens, one over the bathtub.
On January 20, 2010 at 1:51 pm Carol Anne said...
Me too – fan of Marly and R.
Oh, so many phrases from England, use any voice from Monty Python and have a laugh. Laughter is good. West coast Canadian, never heard “Blows Dead Bears.”
On January 20, 2010 at 4:17 pm Melissa Blue said...
Ha. I always say for that truly early hour “I was up at dawn’s crack.” Not as catchy though.
And it’s not a nice thing to say it’s the truth. You and your husband have my brand and humor and really you just feel honest with your observations. No sugar coating. Those are hard to find.
On January 20, 2010 at 11:38 pm Dee said...
Now, you see, I’ve always heard it as “the butt crack of dawn.” Or, that old New England staple, “o-dark-thirty.” I’m digging the dead bears, though, and the dog’s bollocks. It’s like the bee’s knees or the cat’s meow, but infinitely more vivid. And blows dead bears is actually more polite than what we used to say in high school, so I view it as a step up. Win-win-win.
On January 20, 2010 at 7:43 pm AgTigress said...
‘Sparrowfart’ is a pretty common expression for an ungodly early hour here. I had never really thought about it till now, though I certainly thought very vividly indeed about blowing dead bears, and when I tell you that I think in pictures, not words (which is why I seldom ‘get’ puns), you can imagine how searing the image was…
‘Screech of dawn’ is also a common BE jocular alteration of the (perfectly respectable and traditional) ‘crack of dawn’.
‘Dog’s bollocks’ is indeed a general BE expression for something super, but it was also the old printer’s term, in letterpress days, for a specific punctuation mark, the colon followed by a dash. Thus :–
On January 20, 2010 at 11:28 pm marly said...
I thought I was fairly visual until you mentioned how searing the image is. Oh my God – you’re right. All the little hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end now.
On January 20, 2010 at 11:54 pm Skye said...
Great. Now *I* have the visual, too. Just great.
On January 20, 2010 at 12:23 pm Mary Stella said...
I love puns, innuendos, all forms of word play. I never agreed with the English professor who declared puns the lowest form of humor. Most of the time, even when you groan, you laugh or snicker or, at least, smile. If I elicit that reaction, I’ve entertained you and that’s part of my writer job description.
On January 20, 2010 at 5:47 pm Karen J. said...
I’m happy to report that I got to use the “blows dead bears” phrase at work today. The colleague that I said it to was quite impressed. Says something about the types of friends I have at work, doesn’t it?!
On January 20, 2010 at 5:47 pm Kira said...
Asimov has written entire stories just to make a pun at the end.
On January 20, 2010 at 10:43 pm GatorPerson said...
Somebody said what could be worse than bears?
How about possums?
Or skunks?
Oh, and dead alligators really, really stink.
But bears are bigger.
On January 21, 2010 at 1:11 am Briana said...
Late, but just wanted to say YAY for you and congrats on the truck draft. Now let’s hope you don’t actually need to invoke it, as getting hit by a truck might ruin your day….
(And I don’t believe that ANY of it blows dead bears. Not one word!)
On January 21, 2010 at 6:45 am colognegrrl said...
There you can see the difference* – my publisher doesn’t ask for a truck draft. If I got run over, I guess they’d just send a card to my husband and proceed to give another author a chance.
My contribution to today’s topic is the German expression “at the world’s ass”, meaning a place which is hard to reach and you don’t want to go there. Or, to be more precise, you don’t want to hang over a fence there when you’re dead. Which brings us back to the bears.
*between me and a NYT Bestselling Author even if she mops floors occasionally, which I do too even if I don’t have dogs.
On January 22, 2010 at 11:10 pm misspiggy don'twannabe said...
I’ve learned so much from this. Truck drafts and dead bear blowing – I’m sure they’ll both prove to be useful some time.
Today while on Google or Bing – I don’t remember which – while I was looking for something obscure I found something even more obscure. In Pigeon Forge, TN there is a cottage for rent called “Always Kiss Me Goodnight”
On January 24, 2010 at 5:28 pm PG said...
I saw the phrase “blows dead bears” in this post and thought, What is it with Crusie and bears?
On January 24, 2010 at 7:18 pm Jade said...
So happy to hear the truck draft was sent and the book is almost finished! And looking forward to “Wild Ride” release in March!!
Haven’t heard the expression: blows dead bears. A useful phrase–very descriptive.