Sunday 19th February 2017

In which I discover that if I fight for 2 solid hours and dehydrate, my face ends up looking like a prune!
Today’s been a good day.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my potential reader-base is on Tumblr and I need to create one.  But just as silly personal content suits Snapchat, and long form stuff is more suited to Facebook, I need to find out the right cadence for Tumblr.
My social media work is going pretty well.  Snapchat could do with some work but my Instagram-fu is strong!.  I’ve always done OK on Twitter and I like what I’ve done with Facebook in the last week.  It’s been a huge learning curve and whilst I’ve made mistakes and am far from perfect I feel I’m in a far better position than I was a month ago.  The challenge is to build on it.  It does feel like juggling with ever increasing numbers of balls at times
So I’ve taken a task to really get to grips with Tumblr in the next week and work out a way to come up with a content schedule that works.
Most of today was spent fighting.  We move the sparring venue each week and today’s was 2 hours away.  That meant and early start and a long drive but unlike last week where I was sluggish and got hit a lot, I really was on form.
I fought our number 1 fighter (actually he’s currently rated #1 in the world by a very large margin) and even he admitted to me that I was frustrating him.  When I was fat(ter), agility was not my strong point and so I’d fight down the centre line.  My defence is pretty good (some of the best fighters in the world agree) probably because it needed to be due to me not being able to move out the way fast.
BUT
I’ve got a lot fitter.  I’ve lost weight.  Yet I’ve not realised that I’m so much agile than the way I fight.  Combine that with all the cardio I’m doing and I can have back to back fights and still dance around.
So I tried that today.  I started trying to be agile.  Most of the work is convincing myself that I really can pull off those moves.  But I was dancing around and next impossible to hit against the best in the world.  Combine this with the fact that I’m now more aggressive, I really feel that in the last couple of weeks I’ve  really, really stepped up in ability.
As you may remember, I was fully prepared that switching to an offensive from a defensive fight would lead to 6 months of frustration before I found my groove and started pulling it together.  Yet, in just 6 weeks I’m already seeing massive, massive improvement.
I’ve said to people that last year was combating years of underlying illness and getting myself to a level playing field.  People thought I was joking when I said that this year they are going to see frightening improvement.  6 weeks in, and it’s already happening way faster than eveb I thought.
I also got to fight with some new weapons.  Just for fun I fought with longsword and sabre and really enjoyed it.  It’s surprising how a good grounding in swordplay, measure and timing will allow you to fight ‘well’* with weapons you’ve never fought with before.
We finished the session hot and sweaty even though my energy levels on the mats didn’t slow down.  Really proud of myself for how well my stamina holds up.
I came home and because I thought I might have guests, I tidied the house.  That left me exhausted and so the combination of pub lunch, some Sunday night beer and the chocolate I treated myself to means I’ll regret it tomorrow.  I’ve been keeping my weight pretty constant this year and it’s allowed me to build up muscle, but I’d really like to tighten up my lower abs so perhaps I will start being a lot stricter next week.
I got to start a new chapter tonight.  If you remember from yesterday, I was hoping that this one would need little editing and would allow me to race through it.  Unfortunately that’s not the case.  As can often happen, a change in a preceding chapter means that all the dialogue is then reversed, so Person A needs to speak person B’s lines and vice versa.
And of course, it’s not as simple as just changing dialogue attribution as each character speaks differently.
So work on this scene has started with a heavy rejig which has meant slow progress.  Not below average slow, just slower than I would have liked.  But then… I could have written 4000 words in half an hour and I’d still be wanting more!
But needs must… if this scene requires me to go slower and swap and change dialogue, then so be it.
If you want to follow more of my journey, then be sure to check me on my social channels.  Likewise, if you’d like me to expand on any point mentioned above, please say so in the comments.
Twitter: @figures
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. * Well as being defined as hitting the other person whilst having next to no idea about the fighting styles used with the weapon