Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The Book

I have been missing from this blog for three reasons.
1.  I am writing my dissertation
2.  I am writing articles for Fighter Girls!  Check out www.FighterGirls.com to see my column Fight Camp!
3.  I am writing a book!  On female fighters! Squeal! 

Let's go through these



1.  The dissertation - eh.  About halfway done.  That is all.

2.  FighterGirls - I love Debi Purcell and FighterGirls gear.  Right now I am sort of syndicating the articles I have written for this site but will write new material as well.

3. The book.  The glorious book.

Several months ago I submitted a paper for the Pop Culture Association conference on women in fighting sports (see the abstract here).  Although I was unable to attend the conference the abstract was available on the website and it caught the attention of a large publishing house.  One of their editors contacted me and asked for a meeting to discuss my work.  They asked me if I was interested in expanding my essay and writing a book on the history of female fighters.  Um...seriously?  Is that even a question?  A great deal of jumping around  silently while listening to my editor ensued.

It took several months to finalize everything as I wrote a formal book proposal and sample chapter which had to make it past two editorial boards.  The first consisted of two librarians who said they loved it.  One said she found herself 'googling' the various fighters to learn more about them which was a great boost to my ego.  It was wonderful to think that the book will appeal to readers outside the WMMA world who are interested in sports or women's firsts or just the incredible tenacity of those working against cultural norms. 


I still plan to update this blog from time to time, primarily to post product reviews, which I think are incredibly important.  If you are interested in reading more about women in fighting sports check out my friend Sylvie's blog, who is in Thailand right now training and fighting.  It is an incredible website:

http://8limbs.us/

Until next time...keep your hands up

3 comments:

Sue said...

So glad you are back! I had almost 'un-bookmarked' this blog!

Train.Fight.Win. said...

Thanks Sue! This dissertation thing is kicking my butt but I am still writing about WMMA and the like. We'll see what happens once I am inundated with book research and writing.

slideyfoot said...

Awesome news on the book! Let me know if you ever need a reviewer. :D

I can sympathise on the thesis pain. Mine should hopefully be out of the way for a while now, but the workload will jump back up again in a couple of months. Fun times. ;)