Have you ever wandered down a dark street late at night, your high heels clicking loudly on the cobblestones, when you hear a second pair of footsteps behind you?
Is someone following you?
Heart thudding in your chest, you stop.
He stops.
Your pulse races…the hair on the back of your neck stands up.
He’s right behind you.
What do you do?
Run or fight?
If you haven’t experienced this scenario, I bet your heroine has.
“From my experience in the field, I know each fight is different and this enemy has his own agenda. Rape? Robbery? Could be, but I doubt it. They don’t operate this way when they want a woman. They act friendly, use pretty talk to pick up a girl, then knock her off her feet before she knows what’s happening to her.
I pull back, walk toward the rue de la Huchette, one step at a time, like all this is happening in slo-mo. As if the whole scene is a video game and someone else is at the controls, pressing the attack buttons and toggling my polygonal form to do what they want and I have no choice. Enemy contact. Kill’em. Kill’em. These words zap through my brain like a subliminal message from command center.
Keep going back. Left foot, right. My eyes scope out the environment. Stone buildings, windows shuttered. No escape. No one to hear the ruckus, the screams. The punks know that. They talk, egging each other on to see who’ll make the first move. Closer, closer they come, like maggots ready to feast on a warm corpse.
Not mine, you punks.”
I wrote from my first-hand experience when I constructed that scene. A similar incident had happened to me on that same street in Paris and I was lucky enough to get away. But I never forgot that fear pulsating through my veins. The icy chill that goes through you when you make that split decision that can determine whether or not you’re going to survive. Pulling up the emotions I felt that night helped me write the emotions of my heroine.
This scene went through my mind when I attended Dr. Debra Holland’s Workshop: Creating Fighting or Self-Defense Scenes at the RWA Anaheim 2012 Conference. Dr. Debra presented an outstanding workshop showing how to protect yourself as a woman and also how to put your heroine through her paces. She gave members from the audience the opportunity to experience what it feels like firsthand to be attacked by a stranger.
Here’s a video I put together from the workshop:
Dr. Debra Holland — www.drdebraholland.com — teaches a karate class at the American Martial Arts Academy located at1027 N. Harbor Blvd, Fullerton, CA 714 871-3898.
Check out their website for more information: www.KarateOC.com
AMAA has been teaching Women’s Self-Defense Classes for more than thirty years.
Correction:
The gentlemen from the Academy who assisted Dr. Debra are: Steve Hopple and Adam Rigsby.
A special thank you to fellow OCC/RWA member Rob Preece for his assistance in presenting the workshop.
And thank you to Sarah Andre — www.sarahandre.com — who volunteered to experience her heroine’s fight scene up close and personal.
I highly recommend Dr. Debra Holland’s workshop.
Thank you, Dr. Debra!
A couple of days ago, I had to get up very early–I set my alarm clock for 3:15 AM–to take some family members to Los Angeles International Airport for a 6 AM flight.
These days, I seldom even get up before 6 AM. In fact, my goal is generally 6:30. But years ago, when I had a full-time job as an in-house attorney, I had to get up much earlier, especially when my job moved from 10 miles from my home to 50 miles away. I’d already begun publishing by then so my coworkers knew that, when I arrived at 6:45 AM, I wasn’t really “there†because I would write for an hour before the official starting time of 7:45.
But since then, even when I’ve had law projects that required me to work in an office, I’ve seldom had to get up very early. Which now seems a bit of a shame!
On the day I went to LAX early, the drive from my home near Studio City was only about a half hour each way. Compare that to the usual round-trip drive to LAX of at least a couple of hours, thanks to traffic.
I was able to get in a workout at Curves that started at 5:45 AM. I returned home for breakfast and obeying my dogs, then started writing this blog plus my Killer Hobbies blog to be posted this week.
And then I got to work writing.
Okay, I admit that my eyelids were a bit droopy, thanks to my fatigue. Even so, it felt refreshing to start working so early. I think I even got a bit more done that day than I would have otherwise. Although I also admit to taking a twenty-minute nap–and that I still would have liked to have accomplished more.
Will I do it again? I’d like to, especially if it helps my writing productivity. Not sure yet whether I will… but I hope so.
How about you? What’s the earliest you get up to write?
1 0 Read more
“Deep Story Structure & Techniques” with Carol Hughes
COST: $20 for OCCRWA members, $30 for non-members
If you have specific questions, email occrwaonlineclass@yahoo.com
What does Nora Roberts, Stephen King, George Lucas (STAR WARS), Stephen Spielberg (E.T.) and all of those other blockbuster creators know about writing that makes them the mega stars that they are?
Learn about the 18 scenes that every story contains, no matter its length or genre. Find out how to identify your character’s mental gender and what impact that has upon readers. Discover how your character’s arc drives your story and how your story drives your character’s arc. Learn the four throughlines of every story and how to weave them together.
Writer/director/producer Carol Hughes has been a driving force behind some of Hollywood’s most financially successful media franchises. Carol was the studios’ “go to person†when it came to helping her fellow writers turn their uncut diamonds of rough stories into some of Hollywood’s most memorable and financially successful projects. Over the years, her projects generated in excess of $1 billion in profits for both the studios and the leading Networks.
A Slice of Orange is an affiliate with some of the booksellers listed on this website, including Barnes & Nobel, Books A Million, iBooks, Kobo, and Smashwords. This means A Slice of Orange may earn a small advertising fee from sales made through the links used on this website. There are reminders of these affiliate links on the pages for individual books.
By day, Jeanne Pelletier is a small-town girl toiling in obscurity at a stuffy Washington, D.C., law firm; by night, she’s Zahira, the city’s newest belly dancing sensation.
More info →By day they had been fierce rivals in a collegiate golf competition, but at night . . .
More info →To save humanity, a reluctant spy must convince a handsome vampire to trust her, despite the dark secrets each carries, and the mutual attraction they can’t resist.
More info →A Slice of Orange is an affiliate with some of the booksellers listed on this website, including Barnes & Nobel, Books A Million, iBooks, Kobo, and Smashwords. This means A Slice of Orange may earn a small advertising fee from sales made through the links used on this website. There are reminders of these affiliate links on the pages for individual books.
Copyright ©2017 A Slice of Orange. All Rights Reserved. ~PROUDLY POWERED BY WORDPRESS ~ CREATED BY ISHYOBOY.COM