Comments on: The Truck Draft Has Landed

By: Mombo

Mombo — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:37:51 +0000

Wow, you’re bi-lingual. You speak Canadian.

By: Jade

Jade — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:18:06 +0000

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.

By: PG

PG — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:28:53 +0000

I saw the phrase "blows dead bears" in this post and thought, What is it with Crusie and bears?

By: misspiggy don'twannabe

misspiggy don'twannabe — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:10:28 +0000

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”

By: MJ

MJ — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:48:47 +0000

DH says “blows dead donkeys.” Because he’s all about alliteration.

By: colognegrrl

colognegrrl — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:45:39 +0000

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.

By: Briana

Briana — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:11:29 +0000

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!)

By: Meredith B.

Meredith B. — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:44:28 +0000

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”.

By: Skye

Skye — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:54:56 +0000

Great. Now *I* have the visual, too. Just great.

By: Dee

Dee — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:38:11 +0000

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.

By: marly

marly — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:28:17 +0000

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.

By: GatorPerson

GatorPerson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:43:06 +0000

Somebody said what could be worse than bears?
How about possums?
Or skunks?
Oh, and dead alligators really, really stink.
But bears are bigger.

By: Jenny

Jenny — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:36:29 +0000

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.

By: AgTigress

AgTigress — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:43:28 +0000

‘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 :–

By: Kira

Kira — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:47:39 +0000

Asimov has written entire stories just to make a pun at the end.

By: Karen J.

Karen J. — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:47:20 +0000

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?!

By: Melissa Blue

Melissa Blue — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:17:41 +0000

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.

By: Meredith B.

Meredith B. — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:07:21 +0000

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?

By: Carol Anne

Carol Anne — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:51:23 +0000

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.”

By: Mary Stella

Mary Stella — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:23:34 +0000

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.