Changing it Up

When I started this blog, I wanted to keep it focused on my writing journey. However, that's not the only part of who I am, and when the writing is going slow, so does the blog. So I'm going to add some more variety here.

One new thing related to writing, though, is I signed up for an online workshop about Gothic novels. It's a 4 week course. While I'm not writing a Gothic, I thought it would be helpful with the paranormal aspects of my second novel (which I still don't have a title for. Argh.) This is the first online workshop I've taken, so we'll see how it goes. Writer's Digest has quite a few I'd like to take, but theirs are more expensive, so I wanted to try a cheaper one first to see how I like the format before committing a couple hundred dollars to a class. It starts this week, and I'm excited about it.

The other major part of my life (outside of my family of course) is Kung Fu. Not quite 4 years ago I started studying Shaolin Kung Fu. I studied for about a year and a half and made it to the 5th chamber, black sash. There are 35 chambers. I then decided to stop training. There were several reasons for this, the main ones being lack of time and a desire to devote more time to writing. It was a difficult decision, but was the right one at the time.

Last July, I decided to go back. My teacher welcomed me back to the school. Unfortunately, I had forgotten most of what I learned before so had to start over with my training. I feel I am now close to being ready to test for my black sash again. (Kung Fu works backwards from karate - you start with black and work your way up to white sash.)

Two nights a week now I have class for an hour and a half. My school is very intense. There is a lot of physical conditioning, which I need to work on more on my own time. I'm still weaker than I feel I should be. Horse stance is one of the fundamentals. Imagine sitting in a chair, but there's no chair. Now stay like that as long as you can. I bet you don't last long. To test for chamber 5, we have to do horse stance for 5 min. This is something I definitely need to work on more, as I can only hold it for a minute and a half. If I practice every day, and hold it for 5 seconds longer each day, I will reach 5 min in less than a month and a half. Now if I could just stay healthy long enough to have the energy for this, that would be something.