Exciting Times at WKSA!

Exciting times with WKSA (‘World Kuk Sool Association’)… new Olympic-style tournament judging.

Lots of headaches and a lot of work, but in the end it will all be worth it. The new judging will be based on a standard (… a nearly unreachable one set by Master Sung Jin Suh) by which everything will be judged… plus or minus 3 or so points above or below the baseline, but a least a standard against which a competitor’s performance will be judged.

Complicated? Absolutely, but worth it!!

No more judging based on ‘averages’ of competitors in a single ring, barely paying attention and then flipping to a score of convenience (little more than a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘down’).

The next year or so will be interesting as things settle in and everyone gets used to the new scoring rules… but in the end, I think this is probably the most exciting thing that has happened to the Association in decades!

When all is said and done, I think this will set the competition standard not only for Kuk Sool Won, but for the martial arts world as a whole.

Far, far different than anything tried before. Nothing to do but wait and see!

Hobbits are Not ‘History’

Both of my young adult novels, The Dragons of Antioch and The Five Dragon Sword, could probably best be categorized as urban fantasy or contemporary fantasy, centered as they are around a group of high school kids in the tiny town of Antioch, North Carolina who accidentally discover a dragon, Ming, who leads them into all sorts of fantastic adventures.

However, much of the second novel (The Five Dragon Sword) takes place in sixth century Goguryeo (one of the historic Three Kingdoms of ancient Korea)… and therein lies the problem. History.

The bulk of the story (the recovery of an ancient sword, gift from a Silla king and stolen by brigands) can probably best be described as ‘historical fantasy’ — fantasy in that the tale involves dragons and time travel and special powers earned through training in the esoteric secrets of Chines martial arts (which themselves border the line between fantasy and reality), but history in that the story is set against a very ‘real’ backdrop of Korean history.

The problem comes in weaving a fantasy, a fiction, within that historical background… and the (necessary) ‘bending’ of that history for the sake of the story.

Goguryeo was a very real kingdom, as was Silla (one of the southern Three Kingdoms) and their respective kings, Yahngwon and Jinheung; the Göktürk (a nomadic tribe of western Turks who tried to carve an empire east into China and Korea) and their leader, Bumin Khan, were equally real… the story of the sword itself, however, the Yuseongdaedo (‘Heaven Star Sword’) is pure fantasy, as are many of the elements of the story. Little information is available, for instance, on the details of the Göktürk lifestyle, and so many of those details were (somewhat liberally) based on other cultures contemporary to them or offset somewhat by history or place, especially another more well-known Asian nomadic culture, the Mongols.

The problem is my fear that people will read the story (a fantasy, remember) only to criticize certain details because they may not be precisely historically correct, and while pains were definitely taken to make those details as accurate as possible based on information at hand, the bottom line is that it is still a fantasy… a fiction.

The flavor of the history is there, as are many of the details, but in the end The Five Dragon Sword is not a history book!

The best analogy I can come up with would be the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. Many of the elements of the story — the speech, the weapons and armor, the lifestyle — are identifiable as being comparable to English or European history; the elves are based, by and large, on Scandinavian elves; it is impossible not to think of Gandalf as a fictional manifestation of a (more or less) historical Merlin… but hobbits (and really most of the fantastical elements of the story) are not history… and to read Lord of the Rings as history would be a mistake.

And that is the pitfall, I think, of historical fantasy — enough of the elements of history are there to ‘justify’ the reader in being ‘nit-picky’ about other elements that are not quite accurate.

It is is story, though, and not meant to be history… it should be read as a fantasy, primarily, and the historical elements (while adding color and detail) should be read as just slightly more ‘real’ fantasy without getting bogged down in whether sixth century proto-Koreans actually ate kimchi (they didn’t — the red peppers necessary for making that most readily-identifiable Korean food weren’t introduced until much later), or whether the Göktürk actually practiced yağlı güreş (a type of specialized oile Turkish wrestling… which they most probably didn’t).

Color. Detail. But in the end… still fantasy.

So in the final analysis, is the history in Five Dragon Sword ‘real’? Absolutely…

As real as George Washington chopping down that cherry tree; as real as the historic King Arthur pulling Excaliber from a stone to earn him his crown; as real as Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill… set in an historical time, but the events or the characters themselves sheer fantasy.

Enjoy the story, don’t get overly bogged down in the details. And remember the bottom line… hobbits aren’t history.

Blood From A Turnip

I feel a little like a kid in detention… here only because I have to be (although I can see the benefits, again kind of like detention).

I have so many other things that I have to do that it always seems hard to make a blog entry just for the sake of making an blog entry (much easier if I feel like there’s something I need to say, or even just something to get off my chest)… but I’m building a habit (that’s what I tell myself) and it’s something that will be good for me in the long run.

Taking a break from outlining the ‘Olympic-style’ scoring rules for Baek Pahl Ki Hyeong, after which I need to work on my Power Point presentation for the Muscular System (and then the Nervous System, and then… and so on) for my Anatomy and Physiology classes, after which I need to start writing tests (lecture test and lab test) for those same classes, and the … FINALLY … I can have some writing time to myself to start on my next project (which will end up requiring considerably more research than my last two — a narrative non-fiction project involving research, footnoting, bibliography, correspondence, and probably a little travel time).

And in the middle of all this… ideally (if not actually) every day… finding time for a blog entry, trying to squeeze minutes from the day like blood from a turnip.

Detention. Dragged kicking and screaming to the keyboard… but I’ll thank myself for it in the end.

STOP ME BEFORE I REWRITE AGAIN!!!!!!

Just sent the (hopefully) final rewrite off to CreateSpace (okay, I didn’t mean to put ‘hopefully’ in parentheses… this really is the final one this time… I mean it…. no, REALLY…) and loaded the .pdf files onto Amazon’s ‘Search Inside the Book’ feature. Now I’m ready to move on to another project.

Thinking about a narrative non-fiction about the Lost Colony at Roanoke. I had uncovered some interesting twists in the story doing research on something else, and it looks like something that might be fun to pursue.

Also, may think about formatting both Dragons of Antioch and The Five Dragon Sword for Kindle editions (if i can get used to the way the Kindle format looks… very plain and ‘manuscript’ like.

Oh, and for yesterday….

‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party‘

Endless Tweaking…

Just about finished with the ‘tweaking’ of Five Dragon Sword (at least THIS time around). One of the things I seem consistently to have problems with in writing is the inability to declare something ‘FINISHED’ once and for all and then just let it be.

It was the same with the first novel in the Dragons series, The Dragons of Antioch. Impossible for me to read something I’ve written without wanting to change a word here or or an inflection there, correcting a spelling or a punctuation that was missed, and then… it’s off to the races, and before I know it I’m chest deep in a rewrite.

The only thing that keeps this from happening is to move on to other projects, so as soon as I finish up this round of tweaking…

(now where did I put those notes on the Dare Stones?) 

Checking in…

I actually feel pretty bad that my post are so sporadic (but not THAT bad since its been only about two months this time… one of the only advantages of the last post falling NINE  months after the previous one).

I guess blogging is a habit like anything else, and while habits are often hard to break it would appear that at least sometimes (this being one of those times) they can be even harder to form.

‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party’… my dad was a RTO (Radio Telephone Operator, ie. ‘radio man’) in World War Two. North Africa, Sicily, Italy. I remember when I was a kid learning to type and he taught me that phrase; had me practice it over and over… he said it was one of the phrases he had to practice in typing school as a radio man (remember WW2 was all just base sets and walkie-talkies… he could still interpret Morse code thirty years later). They had to type as a part of their job description, I guess.

Anyway, ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party’… if I don’t do anything else, if I have nothing else to say on this blog, my plan is to get on here at LEAST every couple of days and type…

‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party’

(If you see that a lot… at least now you’ll know why)

Passing Through

Nine months…. Sometimes it seems like I’m approaching this blog thing more like someone who is ‘trying’ to quit smoking — showing up occasionally enough to make the effort, but without any real enthusiasm.

My New Year’s Resolution will be to do a better job and try to be more consistent (every day or so, if not exactly daily). Plus a NY’s Resolution gives me another week and a half to procrastinate! 

Writing As Sculpture

Wow! Can’t believe it’s been two months since my last posting …. but I’ve been REALLY busy with other things (so much so that my blog has become not so much a journal as a message in a bottle!).

Biggest project I’ve been working on is the sequel to my YA martial arts fantasy novel, Dragons of Antioch. I’ve been hard at work on it (just about every spare moment) for about eight months, and am finally winding the first draft to an end … which has a lot to do with the title of this particular post.

Still not completely finished (I’m guessing no more than a couple more weeks), it’s already weighing in at a whooping 650+ manuscript pages and just shy of 200,000 words! OUCH!

This first part is the clay. I’ve been throwing it out onto the paper in huge chunks. By the handfuls. Stuff that I know when it hits the page won’t survive the first cut, but I think that’s probably par for the course in any kind of ‘organic’ (read ‘non-outlined’) writing. Unwieldy maybe, but I prefer the style because it allows so many surprises — often story-changing surprises — to develop. As fun for the writer as I hope it will be for the reader.

The next stage is the ‘sculpting’ part, peeling away the non-essentials and throwing great handfuls of them away to get to the 100,000 some-odd words I was looking for all along (a process easily of another couple of months).

The story is there. Now it’s time to begin the telling.

Technology Can Sometimes Be Pretty Annoying …

I checked my email today and found another one.

An inspirational, touchy-feely little story about (this time) an incident at a McDonald’s. Nice story. Inspirational. Tear to my eye. Nice.

But then came the kicker: “If you want something good to happen to you today …” (or words to that effect, always the same, but also always a little different) “… send this email out to ten people …” Aaaarrrgggghhhhhh! I hate those things.

Remember when chain letters used to be chain letters? Absolutely annoying even then, but in the old days it at least cost the price of stamps and envelopes, and so the appearance of one of these in your mailbox was blissfully rare.

With email, chain letters are common enough to have nearly reached plague-like proportions … after all, pixels don’t cost a dime. And that last “if you want/if you don’t” warning is just annoying enough for you to tag your own list of recipients onto the letter (… after all, it doesn’t cost anything …) and send it back out into cyberspace. And now you are a part of the problem, too.

Please. Not more chain mail.

ps. If you want something good to happen to you today, please forward this post to ten people and ….

Cooking A Small Fish

“Govern a country like you would fry a small fish.” — Tao Te Ching, Chapter 60

I am surprised by the number of new rules being adopted/implemented by the ‘new’ WKSA (World Kuk Sool Association) … SO many changes, and so many of them concerned with the tiny little, day-to-day operational procedures of schools and instructors. Rules, it seems at times, simply for the sake of rules.

I have never been a big fan of rules for rules’ sake.

Probably because I am at heart more Libertarian than anything else, a believer in laissez-faire government, and fundamentally independent, rules for rules’ sake is something that REALLY gets under my skin.

It’s times like this that make me want to point out to the ‘powers that be’ (in this case, the ‘Headquarters Masters’ who collectively sign all e-mails and communication from WKSA these days), Chapter 60 in the Tao Te Ching:

“Govern a country as you would cook a small fish” …

Poke it and prod it too much, ‘mess with it’ simply for the sake of messing … and the whole thing falls apart.

Maybe something they should consider.

(I’m just saying …)