What I Did This Weekend

Besides watching hours of Olympics, I went to this:

Yep, an all-female fight card held in Kansas City.  I've been doing some research for a second series and wanted to attend a mixed martial arts event.  I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy this, but I did want to absorb the atmosphere (pulsating heavy metal music and flashing red, white and blue lights - for FIVE hours) and see how these things are run.  Girls in tight black dresses roaming around taking drink orders.  Men in suits.  Families.  Groups of well-dressed women in their sixties chugging margaritas.  Scary looking dudes with muscles and tattoos.

I thought this would be something I'd watch for an hour or two and then leave early.  It's one thing to write light-hearted fight scenes but quite another to actually watch two women (or men, for that matter) go after each other.  Guess what?  I could not take my eyes off the action.  After the first few fights, I forgot I was watching women and just got into it.  As the fights progressed to the main event, the skill levels increased dramatically and I was mesmerized by the fluidity and speed of the takedowns and escapes, not to mention the flying kicks and brutal punches.  I thought I'd do this for research, but I'm on the road to being a fangirl.

India could learn a few lessons from these ladies, but I doubt she could execute some of the moves in those long skirts she's forced to wear.

Tough Victorian Women - Mary Kingsley

The first of an occasionally recurring series of unusual women of the Victorian Era.  Requirement:  India would approve of their exploits.

Mary Kingsley

Student of Medicine, African Explorer, and "the queerest object they'd ever seen."

In an era where women were expected to be content with sketching, needlework, music and other pursuits, Mary Kingsley stands out.  Following the death of her parents, she used her inheritance to finance explorations of West Africa, traveling alone with the assistance of native bearers and guides.  She died of typhus in 1900, contracted while nursing prisoners of war during the Second Boer War.  You can learn more at Wikipedia and at this site.

Scenes from India #3

In India Black and the Shadows of Anarchy, India attempts to thwart an anarchist plot.  I though it would be fun to find a few images of Victorian London which relate to scenes in the book.

India spends some time in the Seven Dials area of London, a notorious cesspool of whores, thieves and drunkards, not to mention anarchists.

She frequents a tavern there, called the Bag o'Nails, which might have looked something like this:

London's streets team with anarchists and their potential victims:

Rule, Britannia

You can't count yourself a true Anglophile unless you can hum this tune.  Britannia has been the female personification of Great Britain for centuries.  Here's a Victorian era version of the valiant lady:

And here's an interesting paragraph from the Wikipedia article regarding Britannia:


"By the time of Queen Victoria, Britannia had been renewed. Still depicted as a young woman with brown or golden hair, she kept her Corinthian helmet and her white robes, but now she held Poseidon's three-pronged trident and often sat or stood before the ocean and tall-masted ships representing British naval power. She also usually held or stood beside a Greek hoplite shield, which sported the British Union Flag: also at her feet was often the BritishLion, an animal found on the arms of England, Scotland and the Prince of Wales."


The version shown here contains the helmet, white robes and hoplite shield with the Union flag, but there's no trident, ocean, ship or lion to be seen.

Freelance Penmonkey

10:17 a.m., CST.  I've read the NY Times, checked out the 30 odd blogs I follow, responded to an email from my editor (Question: what's the title of India #4?  Answer:  Umm, the dog ate my homework?) and am now drawing deep breaths in preparation for churning out the 2,000 words I need to write today.  Which reminded me that Chuck Wendig (the freelance penmonkey of the blog post) writes a very funny blog.   In particular, his post "25 Reasons You Should Quit Writing" is hilarious and reading it is a great way to procrastinate.

The Last Vintage Mystery

ARMS FOR ADONIS – Charlotte Jay (1961)

 As it turns out, I thought I had concluded my eight books in the Golden Girls category of Bev’s Vintage Mystery Challenge but I was one book short. I decided to finish the challenge by trying a second book by Charlotte Jay, whose superb Beat Not the Bones had delighted me.  Arms for Adonis did not disappoint. This book is set in Beirut, a city so beautifully described by Jay that I could almost smell the hibiscus blooming.

Sarah Smith has decided to leave Marcel, her lover, and return to England. She is not an ideal heroine, being far too dreamy and distracted to take charge of her life. She drifts from man to man and situation to situation. As she wanders through the market on her way to the airport, a bomb explodes. In short order, Sarah is kidnapped by a handsome Syrian, sees him shot down, and finds herself delivering a message from him to a member of the Lebanese secret police.

I finished the book without really feeling that I had deciphered the plot. Like Middle Eastern politics in general, it was murky. Was Emile Khalife a villain or hero? Who was plotting against whom? Was Sarah caught up in a coup attempt or a tribal feud? And what of the English characters? Were they caricatures, dupes, plot devices? Upon reflection, it occurred to me that Jay must have intended that, like the country and people she described, the events of the book should remain shadowy and indistinct. The forces at work in the troubled region were and are too difficult to segment and categorize. We are left troubled and slightly bewildered about the story we have read, just as we wonder at the accounts we read today of the alliances and enmities, feuds and revolutions occurring in the Muslim world. Fifty years after its publication, Arms for Adonis illustrates that things change slowly, if at all, in the Middle East.

I’ll be searching out the rest of Charlotte Jay’s work. She’s an amazing writer.

Photo Op

Here I am with Walter Bargan, former Poet Laureate of the state of Missouri, at the Missouri Writers' Guild conference held this past April in St. Louis.  This photo was snapped at the book signing, and I look as if I'm concentrating very hard on remembering what I am supposed to write on the title page.  Actually, I'm getting directions to the nearest Italian restaurant.

Photo by Sarah Whitney