Mostly Harmless!

I’ll be honest, I’ve never liked confrontation. However, when you’re writing stories which are full of fight scenes of one variety or another, I’ve always found it useful to know something of what I’m writing about. I did some fencing in my early twenties and went on to do a fair bit of archery, (which makes it doubly embarrassing that I hadn’t noticed the error in the picture on the new cover version of Trail of the Huntress until someone pointed it out to me recently) but aside from some basic personal defence training in the RAF, I’d never done any hand to hand combat. In the Imperial series I choreographed several hand to hand fights, but never felt totally comfortable in writing some of the scenes. As a result I decided that I needed to learn a martial art.

Tae Kwon Do is a Korean martial art that has been around a very long time. I’ve been attending classes for some months now and took my first grading last Friday. Today I was awarded with my ‘Yellow Tag’ belt, which I suppose in Douglas Adams parlance makes me ‘Mostly harmless’! (I passed with an ‘A’ grade, which probably means I’m quite good at being mostly harmless!) In fact I find myself amused by the fact that I’m now wearing what is probably the most appropriate belt for me – one with a yellow stripe through the middle! If I can just work out how to wear it so that the stripe runs down the middle of my back…

The picture I’ve posted is also a little amusing, as anyone who did decide to pick a fight with me would be most unlikely to get this sort of view. More likely they would see me demonstrating how clean my heels are as I bravely ran away!

All joking aside, however, I’ve found attending Tae Kwon Do classes a great help with writing fight scenes. Just watching the black belt instructors has been a revelation. They appear to have the balance of ballerinas and are incredibly graceful in all their movements. Combine the grace and balance with their power and flexibility and you have a seriously dangerous fighting machine. If I ever learn to look like that, they will have worked a serious miracle in my life!