Roller Derby!: Wreckless Wrenegade (a local color post)

What has been more than a few weeks ago, now, my wife and I went to our first roller derby match. As I mentioned in that post, we fairly quickly picked up on some favorite players, our most favorite of whom was Wreckless Wrenegade. It was clear that she was a notch above the other players in terms of skating, something displayed prominently when she did this rather spectacular leap (yes, a leap on roller skates!) to get around a block by the opposing team. It was called an Apex Jump, I found out, because I was able to set up an interview with her.

That's Wrenegade passing on the outside left from the match we saw.

And this is Wren in her everyday identity.

The first thing I found out is that she looks quite young for her age, which I just decided I'm not going to tell you. She fooled my wife, though, and my wife is usually pretty good at pegging that sort of thing. [I am not good at that. At all.] She likes Star Wars, so she scored points in my book for that; in fact her fiver-year-old son is totally into it. In her "real" life, she works in health care.

Of course, I was interested in her skating background because she was so impressive on wheels and, as it turns out, she used to do competitive ice figure skating. That's an impressive background. Here's her talking about that:

Wren:

I didn't ever want to be a figure skater. I wanted to do gymnastics or dance. I actually really wanted to do tap dancing, but my older sister really wanted to do figure skating, so [because the closest ice skating rink was so far away] my parents basically said, "You have to do what your sister wants to do." So we started going -- I started when I was five -- and I found that I really loved it and enjoyed it. The thing that was always funny, though, about figure skating is that I was always bigger than the other girls so, growing up, I felt like I wasn't the ballerina/figure skater type. I was a lot more powerful in my figure skating. [When I was a teenager] the boys always suggested that I should be a hockey player, that I should be playing hockey with them. I was more of a tomboy, a tough girl that didn't really fit the mold of a figure skater, but I always wanted to be the pretty figure skater.

Later, after not having skated at all for four or five years, her son's dad started telling her that he thought she'd be really good at roller derby, but she was really intimidated to go. Eventually, she made him and her son go with her to one of Resurrection Girls newbie nights.

Wren:

When you think roller derby, you think aggressive, powerful, intimidating women, and, then, you think, "Oh, my God, I'm not going to fit in here." So I went, and it was awful the first night. I was in rental skates -- you know, growing up in ice skating, I always had custom boots, and it was easier than walking for me sometimes -- and it was shaky at best. I mean, it was really bad. But I kept with it, and I liked the feeling of being on skates again. But it was really uncomfortable at first to get used to the quads. Going from a single blade to the quads was really hard for me, but I stuck with it.

Eventually, she got her own pair of skates and tried out and earned a spot on the Cinderollas.

Me: Have you been back on ice skates since then?

Wren: I have, and now that's awkward. It's really strange. It's funny because in ice skating, we stay away from our toe-picks unless we're jumping or using them for something like that, so I wasn't sure if we were allowed to use our toe-stops, and I was scared to use my toe-stop, so I was doing everything I could to avoid my toe-stop and, now, I live on my toe-stop. I'm always on my toe-stop. Now, [with ice skating] I'm like, "Okay, don't get on your toe-picks. Stay away from that. Don't tighten your boots so much." So, yeah, it's different. I'm still comfortable on it, but it's a different feeling.

Of course, because it's me, I also had to ask her about reading:

Wren: I love to read, although I haven't had the time to really pick up a book in a while, so my reading tends to be magazine articles. The one book that I still think about to this day, since I read it so long ago, is Z for Zachariah. It was probably the first book that I read that I didn't want to put down and actually piqued my interest in reading. I hadn't been a "reader" prior to picking up that book up. Another would be Catcher in the Rye. I don't have a genre or preference, but [a book] definitely has to capture my attention by the first 10 pages.

She's only been doing derby for two years but, already, she's coaching and is a vital member of the Cinderollas. As a jammer, it's her job to score the points. Of course, that doesn't come without teamwork, but I've watched her coach, and I think she's well on her way to helping to create a great team. I'm looking forward to the next time we can go see her and the Cinderollas play!

Roller Derby! (a local color post)

My wife and I have very different relationships with skating, both roller and ice. I grew up skating. Roller skating, that is. There was no such thing as ice skating where I grew up in the south. The nearest ice skating rink was in Dallas, nearly three hours away. And, when I say I grew up skating, I don't just mean I knew how. One of the things I did during high school (and after) was work the recreation programs at my church, and we did roller skating. I often wore skates five or six hours a day, three or four times a week. More on Saturdays. Sometimes, I had to adjust to just walking around. I think it's like having "sea legs." Or something.

Despite the lack of ice skating in the south, I made a fairly decent transition to it. Ice skating is more like inline skating, I think, except easier. Yeah, I have not enjoyed my experiences with inline skates, mostly because they just hurt. It's the way they hold the ankles. Just trust me, okay.

One of my wife's early experiences with ice skating (this was just a few years ago) involved having some kid do a power slide into her feet and her bashing her head on the ice. Yeah, she hasn't been back out on ice again since then.

We do go roller skating sometimes, though, and it's a thing my wife wants to be better at. All of which is to say that my wife has a kind of fascination with roller derby, and it's a thing we've talked about going to see for years, especially since a local league was started about four years ago, the Resurrection Roller Girls. Well, we finally went to see a match!

If you noticed the picture at the top, that was on the skating floor where the seats were set up because, yes, there is seating on the skating floor. We, of course, sat in the front row right behind that sign. But no one ran over us. Not this time, anyway. The couple sitting next to us, who were veterans of going to see derby events, did tell us to take the warning seriously because, although it didn't happen often, having players fly into the crowd is not unheard of.

Talk about excitement!

Roller Derby, at least the variety that we were seeing, flat track, was different than we expected. It was slower and had a lot more strategy involved in it. It took us a little while to figure out, at least the parts that we did figure out, but it was very interesting once we did, and we picked up a few favorite players (from our local team, the Cinderollas) by  the end of the night. Our team lost, but it was still very exciting.

I'll be covering some more roller derby stuff coming up in the next few weeks, but, for now, I'll leave you with some pictures of the match we saw.

Nothing Beats a Warm Puppy

I've been talking about my cat a lot, lately. I think that's because it's really an odd thing for me to be attached to a cat. I've never owned one before (unless you count the one we had when I was around four, but we didn't have it for very long, because the neighbors thought it was fun to torture the cat in order to torture me, so we had to get rid of the cat to keep them from escalating to killing it, which, evidently, they told me they were going to do (I was four, and I don't really remember all of that; however, I do remember them tying it to their ceiling fan (on their front porch) and turning it on until the cat flew off)), and I never actually wanted to own one, so all of this with the cat is new to me.

I grew up having dogs, and I feel like I've been neglecting my dog in my blog posts of late in preference to the cat, not that the dog knows this, but it makes me feel bad. After all, nothing beats a warm puppy.

I'm not sure there is anything cuter than that, my little foxy dog. Well, except maybe this:

Speaking of warm puppies, we have the Snoopy Ice Skating Arena here where I live, and they have a cafe attached to it: the Warm Puppy Cafe. See, you can't beat a warm puppy! Here's the real proof, though:

Yeah, that's me after the dog has put me to sleep, because she does that. She's so warm and cozy, if she gets in my lap, she just puts me to sleep. It's like she secretes endorphins right into my brain, and I can't resist. It's a pretty awesome feeling. As close as I'll ever get to what it was like to nap with my kids like this when they were babies, that is until they have grand kids. And as much as I want that, I don't want it for a very long time, so the dog works pretty well in the mean time.

It's been a long time since I've done any of my "Let's Go for a Walk" (with the dog) series,

so expect another one of those sometime soon. I still haven't told y'all about the ruins.

So... I love my cat. Man, that is so weird to say. Wait, let me try that again: I love my cat. Yeah, that's weird. I worry about him, because he's out and about during the day. I don't worry about the dog like that. I don't have to, because she's right here with me all day long. Most often, she's curled up in her little bed down by my feet, and I love having her right here. If I want to get some cuddle time in, she's right here, and I can go sit on the couch with her while I try to work out what's happening next to Tib. [Speaking of Tib, the next part of Shadow Spinner, "Part Thirteen: The Clearing," should be out this next Monday, January 21, and it marks a whole new direction for Tib. If you're all the way caught up through part 12 (like you should be), you'll know that something happened at the end of that one, and nothing will be the same after.] So, as much as I love my cat, I love my dog. I want to say I love my dog more, but I think I just love my dog different. She's always here for me.

And, well, even the cat likes the dog, that's why we ended up with the cat to begin with.

(That's my younger son, who just turned 12 against my will, getting into the picture there.)

Christmas on the Corner

This post is part of Briane Pagel's

The Merry Christmas To All

(e)Book A Day

Traveling Blogathon

(of Doom!)

Kids measure time in holidays. They're like landmarks when you're driving. Unless you're my wife. She has some kind of weird grid in her head with navigational equipment and... and... data and stuff! Me, I have to know where stuff is to get to places. It's sort of like a big dot-to-dot in my head. But I digress. I'm pretty sure kids measure time like this. Summer (yeah, it's like a really long holiday). School starting (bad holiday). Halloween. Thanksgiving. Christmas. String in some birthdays and lesser holidays, and you have a big Time dot-to-dot for kids.

When I wrote The House on the Corner, I took this approach, although I wasn't thinking of it exactly like this at the time; it's still what I was doing. House begins with the end of school and summer. Independence Day is in there. School starts. Halloween is a big one, and the book ends just at Thanksgiving. The problem is that the sequel, Brother's Keeper (see the tab at the top of the page), picks up some months later. Christmas gets skipped!

For a kid, that would be blasphemous.

I knew last year after I released The First Person Edition that I wanted to write a Christmas story, and I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do with it, but the story didn't come together in my mind in time to write it for last Christmas. But I wanted to, and I thought about it all year. Of course, I've been working on Shadow Spinner, so I kept not doing it.

I've gotten into this weird habit where I work on two projects at once: one on the computer and one in a notebook. Shadow Spinner started in a notebook but has long since progressed to the computer. So I started working on Christmas on the Corner

in my notebook during my kids' ice skating lessons. Initially, I was thinking, "Oh, I'll just write a little 5,000 - 10,000 word short story just to get a Christmas story into the mix." I mean, the whole House universe is perfect for little short stories (and I hope to do a collection of them some day); if you've read it, you should understand why. At any rate, I sat down (metaphorically (and literally, I guess, since I was sitting)) to write and kept fleshing out and fleshing out, and what I got was not a short story but a novella (that's actually bordering on a short novel at 30,000 words). There are some important elements in this that will be showing up later.

I like it.

Oh! So, yeah, this is part of the Christmas Blogathon of Doom!, so I'm supposed to draw a name for a free book from the comments, but I'm not gonna do that. Nope! It's Christmas, and I have this new Christmas story, so I'm just gonna give it away today. Yeah, you heard that correctly, Today, Christmas on the Corner is FREE! You don't even have to comment! Just click the link, and go get it! 

And that's not all! Nope, not at all!

Today is also the next chapter in the aforementioned Shadow Spinner, so you can also go get "Part Ten: The Broken Window"

today and tomorrow for FREE! I know you don't want to miss that! And! AND! because I'm such a nice guy you can also get "Part Six: The Man with No Eyes" and "Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree" for FREE!, today, too! But those are just today.

That's FOUR different things that are completely FREE! today!

Now, if you'd like to give me a Christmas present in return, you can click the little "like" button when you pick these things up. It would be a great help. And if you really want to give me a present, leave a review. I'd really appreciate that!

To everyone out there:

Merry

Christmas!

[Note: if you're here looking for the Cavanaugh blogfest post, that one will be up tomorrow.]