Thanks to the prodding of a friend of mine, I decided to try my hand at writing fiction this month for the first time in - oh, years. For those of you not in the know, November is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org if you're interested). The goal is to write a "lengthy work of fiction" totalling at least 50,000 words in a month.
I did it! 50,000 words is a rather short novel, and mine came in around 58 - 59k (depending on whose word count you believe), but still. It's 82 single-spaced pages, with a few page breaks that may one day be chapter breaks. I haven't read it - I mean, I wrote it, and I've read snatches of it to go back and check details that I put in earlier, but I haven't read it from end-to-end yet. And I don't plan to anytime soon. Everything I've read about editing suggests that you should put it down for a while and come back to it when it can be fresh again, so that's my plan. I imagine it will grow quite a bit, since I did a lot of telling rather than showing, and I'm sure there will be further elaborations. There's also a sub-plot I came up with near the end that I'll need to work in earlier in the editing phase, so I have high hopes that it will actually turn out to be novel-length by the time it's all said and done. And, hopefully, publishable. But those chickens, they are not yet hatched.
Of course, it's about karate. But it's also about hauntings and priests and psychotic cowboys.
I think this is the longest work I've ever done. As I recall, my undergraduate thesis was around 100 pages, but it was also in Courier New, which is a typeface that takes up more space than Times New Roman. It's definitely up in the top two, if nothing else.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Amy's Back in Austin
I got back from Berkeley late Sunday night. I always pay close attention to how I feel when I return home after a trip - I feel like it provides a nice barometer for how I'm feeling about my life in general. I didn't have a window seat on the plane, so I wasn't able to watch the Austin skyline as we approached, so my first feeling of being back was as I walked through the airport.
I love the Austin airport, because instead of anonymous airport-chain stores and Burger Kings, it's got BookPeople, and Amy's Ice Cream, and The Salt Lick - it's a nice little (retail) microcosm of Austin itself. I distinctly remember walking through the airport once and hearing a song by Wendy Colonna - a local musician who I went to college with. And as I walked through on Sunday night, I felt like Austin fit me quite well. Not that I'm a big barbecue fan, necessarily. It's more that Austin, like me, defiantly labels itself "weird" while surrounded by...well, by Dallas and Houston, for starters. By the south generally. And it's proudly progressive in a state (and a region) that is decidedly conservative. We don't have it easy like Northern California, where pretty much half the state agrees with us - you don't have to get far from Austin to be back in Texas, if you get my meaning. And Austin *is* Texas, in the same way that I am a product of my rural Louisiana upbringing. We celebrate our heritage and its uniqueness, while cleaving ferociously to our progressive, weird outlook. Overly romanticized? Maybe. But that's me - and that's Austin, too.
To bring this around to karate, while I was in Berkeley I got to train at Berkeley Seido. It was a lot of fun, even though there was the whole "I don't know any of these people!" discomfort, as well as the "I'm wrapping a black belt around my waist, I must reprezent!" discomfort. One of the gifts of my training is that I can face those fears, even if they are still fears. And to prove that it's a small world after all, as I'm changing into my gi, one of the guys says from over the partition, "You're from Austin? You ever go to the Magnolia Cafe?" Turns out he used to work there, for a short time while he lived in Austin in the early 90s. Too early for him to have been able to train at Sun Dragon (Sun Dragon being all-women back then). Maybe that's why he didn't stick around (he only lived here for about 6 months).
The class was fun. It was smallish - there were two black belts (not counting myself), two blue belts, a yellow belt, and a brown belt - all adults, and a brand new white belt who seemed around 8. I believe she was the daughter of one of the black belts (the one who lived in Austin, in fact). We did a lot of push ups. Then we did some more. Push ups (and ab work) were interspersed with kihon, including some combinations. Then we went through all 10 basic self defenses, and I learned the first advanced self defense, and got to see the 2nd one. W00t! Then kata - first taikioku (black belts: ura), and the Seido kata - through 5, though I only did the first 4. After class we did what was apparently a routine post-class soji, where we each got a towel and wiped the floor, from end to end. And then back. I've seen this done before, but never participated in it. It's a nice tradition.
The gender mix was interesting - the yellow belt was a woman (Karen), from Honbu - visiting but thinking of moving to Berkeley/the Bay Area for a medical residency (she was in her last semester of med school). The brown belt was a woman - she was Senpai Todd's wife (he's the head instructor). And the little girl was a girl. Of course, the whole class was only 7 people, so it's not like it was overwhelmingly male. It was only after the fact that I noticed that all of the women there were either a)visiting, or b)related to one of the men there. I know intellectually that martial arts is male-dominated, but that's so not the case at Sun Dragon that I tend to forget it. And then my primary recent experience of a co-ed dojo is Thousand Waves, which has a strong male contingent, but still a little over half women. I enjoy training with men, and it's not like I think Sun Dragon should still be all-women - I just wish there were as many women as men in the martial arts, and I actually find it surprising that that's not the case. I'm a product of my environment, I guess.
By the way, the title of this entry is a reference to the country song of the same name.
The first two lines of the chorus are:
I bet Amy's back in Austin/
Working at La Zona Rosa Cafe
...I'm not working at La Zona Rosa, which is not a cafe (it's a bar). But they got the first part right...
I love the Austin airport, because instead of anonymous airport-chain stores and Burger Kings, it's got BookPeople, and Amy's Ice Cream, and The Salt Lick - it's a nice little (retail) microcosm of Austin itself. I distinctly remember walking through the airport once and hearing a song by Wendy Colonna - a local musician who I went to college with. And as I walked through on Sunday night, I felt like Austin fit me quite well. Not that I'm a big barbecue fan, necessarily. It's more that Austin, like me, defiantly labels itself "weird" while surrounded by...well, by Dallas and Houston, for starters. By the south generally. And it's proudly progressive in a state (and a region) that is decidedly conservative. We don't have it easy like Northern California, where pretty much half the state agrees with us - you don't have to get far from Austin to be back in Texas, if you get my meaning. And Austin *is* Texas, in the same way that I am a product of my rural Louisiana upbringing. We celebrate our heritage and its uniqueness, while cleaving ferociously to our progressive, weird outlook. Overly romanticized? Maybe. But that's me - and that's Austin, too.
To bring this around to karate, while I was in Berkeley I got to train at Berkeley Seido. It was a lot of fun, even though there was the whole "I don't know any of these people!" discomfort, as well as the "I'm wrapping a black belt around my waist, I must reprezent!" discomfort. One of the gifts of my training is that I can face those fears, even if they are still fears. And to prove that it's a small world after all, as I'm changing into my gi, one of the guys says from over the partition, "You're from Austin? You ever go to the Magnolia Cafe?" Turns out he used to work there, for a short time while he lived in Austin in the early 90s. Too early for him to have been able to train at Sun Dragon (Sun Dragon being all-women back then). Maybe that's why he didn't stick around (he only lived here for about 6 months).
The class was fun. It was smallish - there were two black belts (not counting myself), two blue belts, a yellow belt, and a brown belt - all adults, and a brand new white belt who seemed around 8. I believe she was the daughter of one of the black belts (the one who lived in Austin, in fact). We did a lot of push ups. Then we did some more. Push ups (and ab work) were interspersed with kihon, including some combinations. Then we went through all 10 basic self defenses, and I learned the first advanced self defense, and got to see the 2nd one. W00t! Then kata - first taikioku (black belts: ura), and the Seido kata - through 5, though I only did the first 4. After class we did what was apparently a routine post-class soji, where we each got a towel and wiped the floor, from end to end. And then back. I've seen this done before, but never participated in it. It's a nice tradition.
The gender mix was interesting - the yellow belt was a woman (Karen), from Honbu - visiting but thinking of moving to Berkeley/the Bay Area for a medical residency (she was in her last semester of med school). The brown belt was a woman - she was Senpai Todd's wife (he's the head instructor). And the little girl was a girl. Of course, the whole class was only 7 people, so it's not like it was overwhelmingly male. It was only after the fact that I noticed that all of the women there were either a)visiting, or b)related to one of the men there. I know intellectually that martial arts is male-dominated, but that's so not the case at Sun Dragon that I tend to forget it. And then my primary recent experience of a co-ed dojo is Thousand Waves, which has a strong male contingent, but still a little over half women. I enjoy training with men, and it's not like I think Sun Dragon should still be all-women - I just wish there were as many women as men in the martial arts, and I actually find it surprising that that's not the case. I'm a product of my environment, I guess.
By the way, the title of this entry is a reference to the country song of the same name.
The first two lines of the chorus are:
I bet Amy's back in Austin/
Working at La Zona Rosa Cafe
...I'm not working at La Zona Rosa, which is not a cafe (it's a bar). But they got the first part right...
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