Velocipedes, patent medicines, phrenology, Winton motorcars, blues, psychotic harlequins, snake oil salesmen, electroshock, automata, an Edgar Allan Poe-quoting fortune-teller, and a contest of skill played at the crossroads against the Devil.

You’re wondering now, what is this list of weird, cool stuff?

It’s a list–a very partial list, mind you; it isn’t even a complete list–of weird, cool stuff in The Boneshaker.

At long last, things are happening. The book comes out in four months, and I’m starting to get emails and phone calls from contacts who have received advance copies. After one week of play, the Feburary Facebook Boneshaker ARCmania Game (today’s randomly-chosen exciting name) is in full, highly-competitive swing; at last count (and I am counting obsessively) 81 new members have joined The Boneshaker’s FB group for this contest (and I hope you all win). A whole bunch of people have showed up here at The Clockwork Foundry. I hope you’ll all visit often. All things considered, it seemed like a good time to tell you a little bit about the book and why you are going to love it when it shows up on your doorstep on May 24.

For a basic summary of the book, I will direct you to Powell’s (where, conveniently enough, you can pre-order it if you haven’t already). For this post, I have decided to list all the Cool Stuff that went into the story. If you like these things, you are probably going to like this book just on principle.

Cool Stuff that was percolating in my head in 2003 (or whenever it was that I wrote the first draft):

• Item: New Yorker article about the Jamaica Ginger epidemic of the 1930’s, referenced by various blues musicians as jake leg, the gingerfoot, and the old jake limberleg blues. In order to bypass Prohibition regulations that were intended to make the patent medicine called Jamaica Ginger Bitters (or jake) less drinkable, a pair of bootlegger chemists added a plasticizer to it that turned out to be a neurotoxin. (For clarification: patent medicines=cool and interesting. Net results of neurotoxins being added to them=not so cool.)
• Item: Horatio’s Drive, the Ken Burns documentary about Horatio Nelson Jackson’s 1903 cross-country drive in a Winton motorcar, accompanied by a professional bicycle racer-turned-mechanic.
• Item:  Les Automates (French-language photo-essay book about automata purchased at the Strand Bookstore).
• Item: A selection of old books of American folklore, including 3 on the subject of Jack Tales.
• Item: Ray Rupelli’s apartment, with Cool Stuff including but not limited to an antique dentist’s chair found on the street; a coffee table decorated with guitar picks; a piece of iron grate; and a Robert Johnson record, found (I believe) in a box of records cleaned out of some apartment and left by somebody, like so many treasures are, on the sidewalk for pickup on trash day.

So, percolating in my head that year: patent medicines, blues, the Devil at the Crossroads, bicycles and motorcars. Then I started commuting from Brooklyn to New Jersey, and listening to audio books. Which brings us to:

• Item: Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (purchased as an audio book to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel while commuting from Brookyn to New Jersey).  I fell in love with Bradbury’s language and the dark wonder of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, as well as the small-town setting of Green Town. (Although I can’t cite it as a Cool Thing That Influenced This Book because I only read it last month, Arthur Slade’s Dust is another wonderful story about a menacing traveling show that wins over a town, and the single kid to whom it falls to rescue everyone and everything he loves.)
• Item: The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (also bought on audio to keep me from passing out while commuting). Lots of people feel really strongly about the His Dark Materials trilogy or about Pullman himself; some are fans, some aren’t. I’m not getting into any of that. I loved the books, but what I loved most was Lyra Silvertongue, Pullman’s fierce heroine.

So now, to the percolating Cool Stuff you can add: a diabolical traveling showman and a fierce young girl, the only person who can save everyone and everything she loves from Impending Doom:

The Diabolical Traveling Showman: Dr. Jake Epiphemius Limberleg, proprietor of and head of research for Dr. Jake Limberleg’s Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show. Also in Limberleg’s corner are Willoughby Acquetus, Paracelsus Vorticelt, Thaddeus Argonault, and Alpheus Nervine: the Paragons of Science, four specialists in the arts of Hydrotherapy, Phrenology, Magnetism, and Amber Therapy.

The Fierce Girl: Natalie Minks, daughter of the town’s bicycle mechanic and the woman who knows all the weird stories about their crossroads hometown of Arcane. Natalie loves all things mechanical, the Wright Brothers, and the antique Chesterlane Eidolon velocipede her father fixed up for her, even though it’s a meanspirited, hateful, impossible-to-ride boneshaker of a bicycle.

Then there’s Jack, the green-eyed drifter with a carpetbag and a tin lantern, and nobody knows what he’s up to. Except for maybe Simon Coffrett, the man who lives in Arcane’s only mansion…but nobody’s real sure about that Rilke-quoting recluse, either.

Wow, that title’s so good you hardly need the rest of the post, right?

Just in case, here’s the deal: The Boneshaker has its own Facebook group, which I, fledgling newbie that I am, started about a year ago when I had zip in the way of updates and excitement to let people know about. Despite my staggering lack of content at the time, 181 people humored me and joined up. From now until March 1, this intrepid group of superhuman sweethearts are going to tell the world about this amazing book their sister/niece/forum buddy/critique partner has coming out, and the person who gets the most people to join the group wins an ARC. (And you saw how sweet the ARCs are, right? If not, please to read about it here.)

Are you on Facebook? Then you can play, too! Join the group, then refer your friends. Your recruits should write a wall post dropping your name. If you win, I’ll send you an ARC, and I’ll draw one of your recruits from a hat and send one to that lucky person, too. (To clarify: I’ll draw a name, not an actual recruit from a hat. No participation in actual hat tricks are necessary to win this game.) The fun ends March 1.

Thanks in advance, folks! Your assistance in this matter is greatly appreciated.

Calling all people who like weird, cool stuff.

One of my favorite museums, the City Reliquary, needs help right away to stay afloat. I know there are a lot of organizations asking for money right now, but bear with me and think about setting aside, I don’t know, your Starbucks money or something for a couple days and donating it to a great cause that isn’t likely to get a lot of press.

The City Reliquary is a cabinet of curiosities-style museum housed in a Williamsburg storefront in Brooklyn. It started out as a ground floor apartment window at the corner of Grand and Havermeyer Streets, just a few blocks from its current location on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg.

Passersby who stopped for a look could push a button and hear a recorded voice guide them through the collection assembled there. The window’s still there, and still full of a fascinating assortment of Curious and Nifty Stuff. The white lettering you see to the right of it gives directions to nearby landmarks.

The Reliquary moved to its current location at 370 Metropolitan four years ago. In the front room there’s a big jar for whatever donation you feel like making, then you go through a turnstyle into rooms packed with strange collections of wonderful ephemera. World’s Fair memorabilia, a Miss Subways retrospective, an entire Chinatown newsstand.

A Vasty Wall of Postcards

Is it weird that my immediate thought was: must have my own wall of seltzer bottles?

It’s a true gem, staffed by volunteers and surviving on donations and grants, and it’s in trouble.

Evidently over the last couple of years they were awarded some grants they have been unable to collect, and they’ve been scraping by month to month. It seems this strategy’s just reached the end of its viability, which has forced them to look at what it will take to really keep the museum alive. The first, most critical goal they’ve set is to raise $20,000 by March 1 to keep the museum doors open. Visit the site at www.cityreliquary.org to learn more about the museum, and to donate. You can join as a member, or you can scroll to the bottom of the donation page and give any amount you can spare.

Every now and then, here and there throughout the world, you stumble upon treasures . After ten years of living in New York, I still experience this weekly. Instead of crossing a street I pass every other day, I make a right turn just for the heck of it or because I have ten whole minutes of my lunch break left, and I find myself someplace I’ve never been staring at something I promise myself I will remember. I tell myself I will definitely visit again, when I have more time or the light is better or I have a camera. Sometimes I write it down so I won’t forget. Occasionally I make it back. More often I don’t. It’s just the way of strange places, once found: sometimes you go back and sometimes for one reason or another you never manage find them again, which is kind of okay as long as you know others can stumble upon them tomorrow or the day after, just as you did. But strange places also have the tendency to be short-lived, ephemeral. The quirky and special things throughout the world survive because the quirky and special people who find them and love them keep them afloat. If we fail them, they disappear. I hope this one doesn’t go away.

My excuse for being late to my doctor’s appointment a couple days ago was really, really good. Even as I stood at the north end of Union Square in Manhattan with my fifteen minutes of just-in-case-I’m-late time ticking away, I was thinking, this is a really good reason to be a couple minutes late. Don’t get me wrong, something would’ve made me late anyway (I admitted as much to the doctor approximately five minutes before he informed me that chronic lateness was a common indicator of adults with ADD and then proceeded to rattle off a list of five other things that mark me as one of those fortunates), but this was a particularly, unusually good reason. I was waiting for my editor, Lynne Polvino, who was on her way out of her office with an advance readers’ copy of The Boneshaker for me.

My novel, in actual book form for the first time. On the train from 14th Street to Park Slope I held myself very still so as not to jump around and aggravate my fellow commuters. I flipped through the book, looking for the illustrations. I flipped through and read my favorite parts. I smiled until my face hurt. I yanked it out of my bag the second I got to the appointment and waved it in my doctor’s face. He played along like a champ, turning pages and oohing and aahing over Andrea Offermann’s gorgeous cover and illustrations, the font, the blurb on the front from Charles de Lint.

It really is a beautiful thing. I’d show it to you, but I’m currently without Photoshop and MS Paint and I tried and failed to work together for ten minutes before I decided I had better things to do with my time than lose more minutes I’ll never get back screaming at a photo-editing program. I’ll add an image as soon as I can. (Edit: here you go!)

Now, as if having the ARC alone wasn’t exciting enough, posts from last weekend’s ALA in Boston are starting to pop up, one or two actually mentioning The Boneshaker. Here’s one that even sports Jake Limberleg’s handsome spectacled face in its accompanying image:  http://tinyurl.com/ygftcsp.

It’s out there in the world now, I guess. Mysterious advance readers, hope you love it as much as I do.

I work in SoHo, and every day on the way in I walk past the big banner over the Scholastic flagship store on Broadway. When the red one for Catching Fire went up, I realized I’d had The Hunger Games on my to-read list for more than a year. Around the same time, my sister Stephanie asked for some ideas for Christmas and my birthday, and I emailed her Suzanne Collins’ name and the titles of both books. I finished the second yesterday at 3 a.m., roughly four hours after I started it on the train home from work and roughly eight hours after I finished the first during my lunch break.

Why don’t I time these things better? Now I have to wait until AUGUST or something for the third book. As if it wasn’t bad enough to have read Westerfeld’s Leviathan the week it came out and now have to wait till October for Behemoth. I almost went berserk in the four hours I had to work between finishing The Hunger Games and starting Catching Fire. Now this. The third book doesn’t come out until…that’s right…AUGUST!!

For anyone who isn’t aware of how awful this situation is, allow me to explain. The Hunger Games series takes place in Panem, which is what is left on the North American continent after global warming and global wars have hacked it down to a Capitol and twelve outlying districts. Seventy-odd years ago, the districts (then thirteen) rebelled against the Capitol, but the rebellion was put down brutally, resulting in the destruction of District Thirteen and the inception of an annual act of penance in which each district–the populations of most of  which are now all but starving–must send two tributes, a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 and 18, to the Capitol to compete in the Hunger Games. One tribute will win, taking food and fame back to his or her district. The others don’t get to go home at all. The Games are a battle to the death, televised on national television.

Yes, fully half the book is about twenty-four children teens killing each other on live t.v.

Oh, it’s also about family, responsibility, civics, community, and standing up for what’s right. It’s a devastating love story. And Katniss Everdeen is one of the fiercest, coolest heroines I’ve ever had the agony of wishing I’d written myself, right alongside John Scalzi’s Zoe (Zoe’s Tale). And as much the dreadful manipulations of the Capitol and the Games themselves will horrify you, they will all seem perfectly logical, the logical results of the society that has twisted itself to become Panem. And you will ache, along with Katniss, Peeta, and Gale, for rebellion.

And then you’ll have to wait until August. But it will be worth the wait, I have no doubt.

You know you love free books. Who doesn’t? Here’s two ways to win some stellar new reading material from some amazing YA and MG writers–but move quickly! Deadlines are coming up fast.

Ending first (as in, ENDING TOMORROW): The crew at the Enchanted Inkpot has put together an absolutely amazing giveaway for the holidays: our First Annual Inkies Giveaway Extravaganza!

Each row represents a gift basket some lucky poster is going to win. Row 1: Fairytales and Folklore; Row 2: Adventure and Witchcraft; Row 3: Ancient Curses, Modern Ghosts, and Post-Apocalyptic Tales. And that’s not all! Here’s the contest description from the Enchanted Inkpot site:

“There will be a grand prize winner and 2 runner ups. Winners will be based on the following criteria:

1. The Grand Prize winner will have first pick and choose one of the book gift baskets AND will also win a $25 gift card to Powell’s Books AND a copy of ICE by Sarah Beth Durst. The winner will be chosen based on who provides the most online promotion points for our contest, via blog, facebook, twitter, etc. One point is awarded for the type of promotion and the number of times such promotion is provided. For example, a person who tweets and blogs about it for all 14 days of the contest will earn 28 points. Honor system is in place so you will be required to tally up your points yourself and we’ll check’em. YOU MUST COMMENT ONLY ON THIS ORIGINAL CONTEST POST IN ORDER TO QUALIFY.

2. Second runner up will choose from the remaining 2 baskets. The winner will be the person who comes in second with the most online promotion points.

3. Third runner up will win the last remaining book gift basket and will be chosen from a lottery. Anyone can enter the third prize drawing. All you have to do is answer one of the following questions. What MG/YA fantasy would you like to read over the holiday break? What fantasy book most reminds you of the Holiday or New Year season?

Contest ends on December 9th, 2009. And our apologies, but due to the large size of the prizes, the contest is only open to US and Canadian residents. Don’t forget, all contest entries are accepted only in the comments section of this contest post. Comment as much as you like and help spread the word! Good luck everyone!”

And as you have no doubt noticed, TODAY IS DECEMBER 8TH! Get moving, people! You have mere hours to comment, post, and generally rack up some crazy online promotion points!

Ending soon (as in, MOVE IT! We don’t have forever, people): The oh-so adorable Lindsay Eland’s super-sweet debut, Scones and Sensibility, comes out in two weeks. You can get your hands on a copy straight from Linds herself by entering the SUPER-FABBY SCONES AND SENSIBILITY CHALLENGE at Lisa Amowitz’s blog, Why A?

Scones and Sensibility is the story of Polly, a young Jane Austen-obsessed would-be matchmaker whose efforts to bring together lonely people in her seaside hometown don’t precisely pan out as expected. Linds is a critique group friend of mine, and having read this story from its early stages, I can tell you it is an absolutely delicious gem of a book.

To enter to win your very own copy (or, for second and third prize, a critique from at least one member of our bloodthirsty critique circle), follow Lisa’s blog, Why A? and leave a comment describing an ill-conceived love match, set-up, or blind date in 2-3 paragraphs or so. Humor, Lisa says, is encouraged.  The contest will close on December 22nd, or after the 50th entry, whichever comes first. Have fun!

On Friday, Nathan had knee surgery. What followed was supposed to be a restful if painful and drug-hazed recovery for him, and a functional staycation for me while I played at being a nurse and earned some serious credit the week before my birthday. I’m not sure how much credit I’ve earned, but the pain pills aren’t hazing Nathan up as much as I think he was hoping they would, and it turns out running out for ice a couple times a day is kind of annoying. Oh, yeah, and I think I’m getting sick, the day I have to go back to work. Most disturbingly of all, we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time watching DVD on tv, and to my horror I have discovered I have way too much in common with 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon, which wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t actually gone to events this weekend where it would’ve been nice to look like a functioning human (last night I went to the SFWA’s New York reception for the first time, during which, by my count, I experienced only one true Failed Conversational Gambit and dropped my purse only once while attempting to hang it on my umbrella. I believe I invoked mixed martial arts only once as well, which is probably a positive. I also met no less than ten really wonderful people and saw a Michael Jackson impersonator).

In addition, this weekend I  managed several updates to my evil empire of WordPress pages and slept as late as Nathan’s pain pills allowed every morning…so actually…I guess if you discount the acute social anxiety made worse by watching too much 30 Rock…it was a pretty great few days. Oh, yes, and Nathan’s doing just fine, except that he’s just reminded me that we haven’t had breakfast yet. Back to home nursing detail!

Jacket art’s up for THE BONESHAKER in all its bright red glory! Have a look at Andrea Offermann’s beautiful cover!

The crazy redhead in the middle is Doctor Jake Limberleg, proprietor of Limberleg’s Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show (an event not to be missed once it rolls into town on May 24th of next year and wreaks havoc in a small Missouri town called Arcane). I discovered the cover image had gone up because someone I don’t know contacted me through Goodreads, which was a special kind of exciting, and reminded me that, once again, I’ve failed to update this site in, oh, forever.

Yesterday was a big day here at Milford Command Central, even apart from the cover. Nathan had his first knee surgery: ACL and meniscus repair on the left leg. In three months we get to do the other one. Whoopee! Actually it’s not so bad. He’s got good pain drugs, the brace isn’t really slowing him down all that much, and all I have to do to be a rock star is keep him in strawberry licorice, Skittles, and percocet, every once in a while refill the ice machine that keeps his knee cold, and occasionally change the dvd (we’ve now finished The West Wing and have started 30 Rock).

Meanwhile I have a bottle of whisky I’m pretty excited about cracking into, there’s a UFC tonight (please, Forrest, redeem yourself so I don’t have to cry), and this afternoon at Borders at Columbus Circle Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, and Geoff Manaugh are speaking. Holy city fiction awesomeness! After the event the authors are hitting at a local bar and attendees are invited. I’m going to go and probably totally going to be completely socially awkward and have nothing interesting to say. But I’m going to go anyway and try to have a conversation with one of my favorite authors, maybe mentioning the work I do for the city of Nagspeake if I feel particularly brave, and hope I don’t sound like a kid trying to sit at the grownup table. Then I will come home and watch UFC with my bionic-legged husband and get into that bottle of whisky and obsess about whether or not I said anything stupid (because I am always pretty sure I have said something stupid).

At least, it being a UFC night, I am guaranteed a remote chat with Annabelle Bechamel at Magothy Treats via Twitter. And it’s a beautiful day, so I’m thinking about a run. Plus I found a new Thai restaurant in the neighborhood that makes awesome green curry, and there is that whisky. So, my social anxieties notwithstanding, it promises to be a good day!

Not long ago I was in Orlando at a company conference when I got a phone call from a very nice gentleman at McNally Jackson, one of my favorite bookstores. My copy of Boneshaker had arrived and was waiting for me when I got back to NYC. Hooray!

No, not my forthcoming first novel, in which a young girl battles the demonic forces of a traveling medicine show with the help of, among other things, an antique bicycle. I’m talking about Cherie Priest’s novel of the same name, which broke my heart when I first heard about it, despite the fact that the second I read the description I was immediately dying to read it. (Here’s Cory Doctorow’s review on BoingBoing: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/29/boneshaker-cherie-pr.html.) Well, last weekend, I finished reading it. This much I’ve already said on Twitter and Facebook: if I gotta share a title, this is the book I want to share with.

I’m a newbie novelist. Of course I hated the idea that my baby, my firstborn, after a long and painful title change process, had to share. I first learned about Ms. Priest’s book when I wrote a post about the agony of finding the perfect title (it’s here, for anybody who’s interested: http://community.livejournal.com/enchantedinkpot/21833.html). The first comment was a concerned poster wanting to be sure I was aware that the new, perfect title I’d changed mine to was a duplicate. I was, needless to say, not aware. But it turned out my publisher was, and Clarion had decided that, for a number of reasons, the duplication was a non-issue. My book’s for ages 10 and up; Ms. Priest’s is for adults. Her boneshaker’s a drill, mine’s a bicycle. Mine’s coming out six months later, and in a different format. No biggie, basically. Which makes me happy, because, as I said, I just finished reading BONESHAKER, and it’s so very good. If you like zombies, airships, Seattle, or maniacal inventors, you should really go pick this book up right now. Love steampunk? Love horror? This book is for you.

In Cherie Priest’s imagined Seattle, it’s 1879 and the Civil War is stretching on, and most of the city has been enclosed in a wall to hold in the disastrous effects of a blight gas loosed by the Boneshaker of the title. (Sixteen years ago, Leviticus Blue built and tested the Boneshaker, which was intended to expedite mining in the Klondike. Instead, it tore through the underpinnings of the city, releasing the Blight, which turns those who breathe it into flesh-eating undead “rotters.”) Ezekiel Wilkes, son of Leviticus Blue, is desperate to redeem the memory of his father, and finds a way into the enclosed city to search for something to prove Levi wasn’t the monster history has made of him. His mother, Briar, goes in after him when she discovers him missing. What follows are spectacular and deadly hijinks in a nightmarish landscape peopled not only with zombies but those who have, for one reason or another, chosen to make the deadly heart of Seattle their home. It’s a tremendous adventure (it’s going to make an insane film for somebody—I’m looking at you, Terry Gilliam; get cracking) but what I love best about it is the city Ms. Priest has built on the historically mutated bones of her hometown. Cities are and always will be my favorite characters, and although both Briar and Ezekiel are wonderful, it’s the scrappy survivor that is blighted Seattle that the author brings most vividly to life: a place that is at once hellish and awesome. This city is the perfect embodiment of Freud’s uncanny: homely and unknowable all at the same time.

So anyway, I recommend it. Highly. Go get it, why don’t you? And since you might have to order it, why not go ahead and order both Boneshakers? Just make sure you have Amazon or whoever send them separately. My book you’ve got to wait until May for, but Cherie Priest’s zombie phantasmagoria is out now. It’ll at least get you through October. Then you’ll only have four months to wait for mine.

All the West Wing fans out there will know what I’m talking about by a Lemon-Lyman moment. In one of the early seasons, Josh Lyman, the Deputy Chief of Staff, discovers there’s a forum out there on the web dedicated to “all things Josh.” Never having posted on a forum, Josh blithely begins commenting and replying to the community, not realizing how seriously forum participants take things. By the end of the episode he’s made a fool of himself and the Press Secretary’s threatening physical violence if he ever posts on a website again. So I know better than to randomly post stuff. I participate in maybe two children’s writing forums, and before I click that comment button, I read my contribution fairly obsessively to make sure I’m not about to pull a “Josh.”

So why I posted last night on boston.com as the 82nd comment in response to Peter Funt’s article comparing Mixed Martial Arts to dogfighting, I really can’t tell you. As soon as I did it I was pretty sure it was a bad idea. Actually I do know why I did it: my leg hurt so badly I could barely walk on it, and I was working on a very strong martini I mixed up as a direct result of the sore leg. At the time, it seemed like the absolutely right thing to do.

For those of you who are visiting this page for the first time, I just spent the last six weeks or so completing revisions for THE BONESHAKER, my first YA fantasy. As a result, I skipped muay thai for six weeks–just didn’t have time, between my full-time day job and the almost-as-full-time writing that needed to be done. I went back to class on Wednesday for the first time, and back to sparring yesterday. It was so good to get back. A couple of people even commented that I seemed to have come back better after taking a break. My kru, Brandon, gave me a really high compliment: while sparring with him, he landed a nasty leg kick on me. One of the guys in class (who also instructs some students of his own) told me that was one of the meanest kicks he’d seen Brandon throw in a sparring class. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it sure felt like it. By the time I got home, I could barely walk on it. So I took my dogs out and hobbled around the block until I wasn’t limping anymore, came back in and mixed a martini. I got on Twitter and saw my husband’s re-tweet of fighter Joe Lauzon’s response to Mr. Funt’s Boston Globe op-ed piece: “The Disturbing Appeal of ‘Human Dogfighting.’” I read the article. I read Joe’s reply. Then I read the 81 comments others had posted to Mr. Funt. Then I wrote a reply myself and posted it. I got up this morning and re-read it, dreading what gin-fueled typos and mixed metaphors I was doubtless going to find in my post…and decided that I liked what I said. So here it is.

The nine preceding pages of comments have provided excellent rebuttals to Mr. Funt’s article, and UFC fighter Joe Lauzon wrote a great response on his website (http://joelauzon.com/blog/2009/07/a-poor-comparison/). I wanted to give my perspective, particularly to those who responded to the argument that MMA involves willing participants by asking why people can’t find something better to do with their time than fight, and who think MMA breeds some kind of culture of aggression, and to those who accused MMA fighters and fans of the sport of being “degenerates.”

I’m a girl. When I was 10 I played soccer and softball. When I was 14 I was a dancer. I have two bachelor’s degrees. I manage a boutique in NYC, working 40-60 hours a week. I’m a soon-to-be-published children’s author, (a second full-time job). For almost the last year (which anyone here that follows MMA will tell you is no time whatsoever) I’ve trained in muay thai, a centuries-old martial art that’s a cornerstone of MMA. Muay thai provides much of the standup striking MMA fighters rely on: punches, elbows, knees, kicks. I got into it because of my husband, who’s since taken up Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which provides much of the on-the-ground submission technique in MMA.

I’m not a professional fighter, and muay thai isn’t MMA, but it’s fast and full-contact and it involves a lot of those shots to the head that seem to bother everyone. I spar regularly, with no more protective gear than a mouthgard, gloves, and shinpads. I take shots to the face. I take kicks to the legs and body. I regularly walk into work with bruises. One of these days I just might get a bloody nose, and if I do, I’ll tap gloves with the person responsible and tell them it was a really good shot. Then I’ll clean myself up and get back in the ring. I’m not an aggressive person. I have never been in a real fight. But nobody worries about me walking home late from work, I have less anxiety than I’ve ever had, and I’m in better physical shape at 32 than I was at 18. If I had the time to train for a real muay thai bout (and muay thai IS sanctioned in NY) I would do it in a heartbeat, not because I have a deep-rooted need to beat some other woman up, but because it is something I love to do and part of the joy of it is pitting one’s skill against someone else’s. As far as I’m concerned, MMA is just a bunch of guys (and some amazing women, by the way) who train in not one martial art but many, and have chosen to make this their livelihoods.

When I have a daughter, if she wants to learn a martial art, I will be delighted. Even if she just wants to play the piano, she’s still going to learn a couple chokes and a few decent strikes because in the same way that a girl should never be without spare change for the phone, every girl should know how to throw at least a good jab-cross-hook-uppercut combo.

If she wants to, we’ll let her stay up late with us to watch the UFC, too.