research

2012 was the Year of Doing Frightening Things, and I did. Some of them were more frightening than others, and some of them were entirely unintentional, but over all I think I challenged the way that I think about a lot of things in my life and that’s good. I even got a poem published and made some friends on the way. I can consider that mission accomplished. However, I cannot consider myself done with missions entirely. My princess is in another castle, you see. Time to shimmy down an improbably sized drain pipe and move forward. 2013 will be the Year of Finishing Things.

I am total shit at resolutions. I never keep them and I never complete them, so instead of setting myself up for finishing failure, I’m going to make goals instead. I’ve outlined them below. If you catch me slacking in the next year, please beat me about the head and shoulders with the closest non-lethal instrument and get me back on track.

Health-

Drink more water: This one is pretty self-explanatory. But seriously, I drink too much soda. It’s probably gross to anyone else who stops to think about it.
Walk to Rivendell: God but I love nerds. Some enterprising Lord of the Rings fans got together and worked out the distances between key locations in Middle Earth. It is 458 miles from Hobbiton to Rivendell. Armed with that knowledge, I am pledging right now to make it to Rivendell by the end of the year. I want to walk/jog at least a mile a day, not including time spent doing walking heavy activities like being at theme parks or in big cities. A mile extra. My writing partner, Alli, has put together a spreadsheet for us to keep track of our distances. For added fun, if you use this website and enter your total mileage, it will tell what you are seeing as you go.
Prep to run a 5k: Ideally, eventually, I’d like to be able to run a half marathon, but let’s not put the cart before the horse here. I would like to enter and run at least one 5k before the end of the year. Preferably in less than half an hour. Not that I have any idea how long you’re supposed to take to run a 5k, but half an hour sounds good.

Writing (fiction)-

(IE, I’m wasteful with my words, and in turn, my words are wasteful with me.)
Burst: I think I’ve finally settled on a time period and overall scenario for this novel I’ve been kicking around in the back of my head for the better part of the year. 1915, travelling sideshow, two young-ish girls just trying to figure out what they need and how they can leave. See also: makeouts, flocks of birds, rain of diamonds, and an old magician who doesn’t do magic. It should be fun to work on at the very least.
Volunteer Vampires: Guys, I know. I know that I’ve been saying I was going to finish this all year. It’s just a lousy short story. Why do I make everything so hard? I don’t know. Hence forcing myself to finish things.
The Steampunk: Alli and I got sidetracked on this because of life. Life is pretty lame. But hopefully in the next year we’ll be able to make some actual headway on it. It’s always nice to return to that universe, so I’m really looking forward to it.
Superheroetry: Sometimes I just have really dumb ideas that I can’t let go of! I like to think that’s part of my charm. In this case I think I’ll write a collection of poems about superheroes. Probably made up ones, since I can’t afford to be sued for copyright infringement.
Poetry (legit): I’d also like to polish up some of the poems I already have and work on new ones to submit to different places. You will not be able to escape me! Moo ha ha!
Submit to places: A short list of publications I’d like to submit work to over the next few months is: Yeah Write, Snake Oil Cure, Plunge, Spark Anthology, other things I discover as I bumble about the internet.

Writing (non-fiction)-

(IE, I’d also like to make sure I’m writing regardless of inspiration or cause, so there are several things I’m planning on keeping up this year outside of any attempt to really publish. Just so I don’t lose sight of what I want to be.)
This blog: Surprise! None of you are surprised. I need to be around here more often. I really struggled last year, trying to find a tone and a purpose for this thing. I don’t want it to be a writing blog, because I feel I have no authority there yet. But I DO want it to be a blog that writers want to read and than help me interact with other people who have similar interests. Because of this I think this year I will try to run it as the blog of someone who happens to be a writer, but who also does a whole bunch of other things that she likes to natter on about on the internet. That’s probably the most authentic tone I can strike right now. You know, since I DO do a whole bunch of things and I REALLY love to natter about them on the internet.
Friday Fours: I know the Friday Five is popular about the internet. I don’t want my Friday activities to be confused with being a part of any official Friday Five, mostly because I don’t want to disappoint anyone looking for such a thing. So I will do Friday Fours, based on, well, whatever I want to base it on. I’ll probably be taking prompts for those elsewhere. Hopefully they’ll ensure that I’m here at least once a week.
Research: Gosh, do I love researching things. Just the other week when I was doing some planning on the new Burst outline I learned that Inspiration (1915) was the first movie to include a nude scene from a leading female that was not pornographic. That’s the kind of information I feel like everyone should know! I’ll be posting things like that more often when they strike my fancy.
Wasting My Thirties: I only really mentioned it here once, thoguh I have linked to it from my twitter account several times times. When I turned thirty this year I started a Tumblr dedicated documenting the ways I will spend this monumental year changing and growing. That stuff is more personal than I think I want to have up here, so if you’re interested in my minor freak outs, ridiculous pictures, and occasional reblogs, then please come by and stay a while.
A Year With Hafiz: Have I mentioned I’m addicted to Tumblr blogs? Because I think I’m addicted to Tumblr blogs. One of my plans for 2013 was to make my way through the book A Year With Hafiz by documenting a reaction/reflection to each day’s poem. When I mentioned that I was thinking of doing this I was asked by a few people to make it public, so now it is: My Brother, the Light.

Well, none of that should be too hard, so long as I keep my wits about me and forget what it feels like to be lazy. I have some other goals, but they’re mostly money and clutter related and I realize you’re probably not all that interested in hearing about how I most certainly not allowed to buy any more cardigans, because Jesus Crimminy I have way to many cardigans and before I move I should really get rid of some of the freaking cardigans. So yeah, it’s like that. Are there any things you’re looking forward to accomplishing finally?

Here’s to tomorrow and every day after.

This past weekend the Florida Steampunk Exhibition East was held in Daytona Beach, Florida, which is only an hour or so away from me as the crow flies, so I had to go. I feel like I don’t spend enough time here talking about how much I love steampunk. I talk some about how I’m writing in the genre, but I don’t give it the same breathless space and time here as I do in other places around the internet. So just to catch you up to speed: I LOVE STEAMPUNK.

I love it as a genre and an artform and a dress sense. I love the endless possibility and the optimistic daring do of the people involved and the characters that they write or portray. I’m just as fascinated with the darkly tinged not-so-nice-history parts of it as I am with the bright, shiny leather and brass parts. And as you might imagine, this all lays very neatly over my general appreciation for Wacky Victorians anyway, so it’s a perfect fit for a person such as myself who loves reading and writing in the science fiction genre.

Even more specific to my urge to attend the convention than my love of steampunk in general, I had seen that there was going to be a three hour panel/class called Victorian Self-Defense. I had thought that it would be about bartitsu (which is an interesting subject in itself), so you can imagine my jaw dropping surprise when Alli and I showed up and found two gentlemen standing at the head of the room with rapiers.

We both sat down and immediately began taking furious notes. Two of our characters are kind of swords-for-the-cause in employ of the main gentleman driving our revolution, and while I had done research into sword fighting with both fencing foils (and epees) and sabers, there is little internet or book research that can compare to having two people in front of you actually explaining things like footwork and posture and timing. We spent a good thirty minutes taking pictures and scribbling diagrams and whispering back and forth to each other about how cool this all was…and then the instructors* asked if anyone wanted some hands-on instruction.

Alli jumped at the chance, and I followed. There were about seven to ten of us at the time. Each one of us was handed a bamboo rod shown how to stand and we were off. The two instructors would explain and demonstrate what they wanted us to do–things like forcing your opponent’s sword offline or giving and avoiding a beat–and then have each of us perform the action against them. The two gentlemen running the class were professional and patient and seemed to enjoy being able to have the interaction, and that made the whole thing all the more enjoyable for the rest of us.

Then came the tipping point in Alli and my’s mutual giddiness about rapier instruction in general. They acted out a throw and then had each one of us practice and perform it against one of them using the rapier. I know that logistically they had to give us the rapiers, because bamboo rods don’t have hilts with which to hold down another person’s blade, but I honestly felt a bit like I’d been handed Auryn** in that moment. The sword was a little heavier than I thought it would be and the basket fits around your hand in a way that makes you part of the sword and just. It was an awesome moment and I really want to thank the two of them for it, as well as the organizers of the event for inviting them and setting up an experience like that in the first place.

The rest of the day was kind of spent in the hazy glow of ‘oh god they let me hold a sword!’ I was extra pleased as well that Alli noted during the class that most of the sword fight scenes I’d written between our characters were actually pretty solid, technically. Not that they’ll end up in the novel because I just wrote them as character pieces, but it’s extra nice to know that I wasn’t completely off base. (Though I am going to have to make Edmund spend a bit more time with foil or rapier when he’s teaching William, even while he prefers saber himself.)

We were still buzzing from the rush of it all when we got home in the evening, so right now we’re looking into fencing clubs here in Orlando. You never know, it could be a fun way to get in more exercise and learn a new skill. It is definitely a way to have a few more of All Of The Experiences and would give me even more things to blog about.

Now for the informative part of the post!

If you would like to learn more about steampunk, there have been a whole slew of excellent articles written, but Tor does a Steampunk Week that always has articles of interest for people who are new to the concept or find it all to be old hat. The links from 2011 can be found here.
The instructors of the class gave me several resources for reading about swordsmanship and style with different types of weapons. Those are:
Chivalry Bookshelf – who publishes many out of print texts on all sorts of things, including swordplay.
HEMA – The website for Historical European Martial Arts.
The Western Martial Arts Coalition.
And the works (if I can find them) of William Wilson, Achille Marozzo, Fiore dei Liberi, and George Silver.

All of that should keep me and you guys busy for quite some time. Now I must away to work some more at our wonderful little steampunk world. It had been too long when I started in on it today and immediately fell in love with our characters all over again. Funny how that happens. And just appease the voice of Edmund in my head after all this talk of straight edges with points at the end, here’s my favorite of the sabers I’ve researched. Turkish, 19th century, housed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* I didn’t catch their names! It’s not in the program or on the site or readily available in any search done by me in the last ten minutes! If anyone knows, please share so I can add them to the write up and also love them from afar.

** Auryn, for those of you not into 80s movies, is the serpent pendant from The Neverending Story that guides Atreyu on his quest.

KL!

Tag

.028 – The Year of Finishing

.015 – They let you hold weapons?