However, I get asked questions from time to time that illustrate just how much we left out of the book - it's only a couple of hundred pages and so we had to pick and choose what to include. Our first decision was to focus on matwork but even that left out a lot.
A week ago, a young man asked me if it is possible to arm bar both of someone's arms at the same time. I told him that it sort of is possible. It's not exactly simultaneous but the best way to do it is catch one arm with your legs and have that in an arm bar position and then reach across and do a bent arm bar on the other arm with both of your arms. So, you have one of their arms caught with your leg and the other arm in a two-on-one situation. Then you can arm bar both at once. I showed him and he thought it was really cool. He asked if I thought there was any possibility Ronda would do that to Miesha. I told him probably not because it is more of a showing off move and she will probably just take the first opportunity to end the fight and then go out for chicken wings.
I was demonstrating on another young man how to do a sliding lapel choke and how that combined with an arm bar for a technique we used to call the "hell strangle" when I was a kid.
I think I'm going to start writing it down every time I teach something we did not include, I can start with that as an outline for my next book. As I said, I don't know how long it will be before the next book since I'm swamped at the moment and Jimmy told me after we finished Winning on the Ground that he wasn't going to do another one. It was a lot of help doing a book with a co-author. I'm certain I never would have finished it without him.
One of the things I did learn from the last book though, is that the way to write a book is, as it says in Alice in Wonderland,
"Begin at the beginning, go on until the end, and then stop."You can buy Winning on the Ground while you wait for me to write the next one. Give it to your friends for Christmas. You have friends, right?
I just got home from my niece's graduation in Missouri and it is two hours later there, so I guess I will go have a glass of wine with my husband and turn in. If you remind me, I will tell you why I wrote this book and where the royalties go. (Hint: It is not the AnnMaria's Chardonnay fund.)
Jigoku jime (Hell Strangle) is a fun one when doing Ne Waza! Don't know any other smooth way to get into it than hooking the arms and rolling over them when they are on all fours (usually trying to turtle). I plan to get the book after the New Year.
ReplyDeleteThanks as always for your humor and insight!
I just bought the book on Amazon. So glad you began at the beginning..... Thank you. As an author myself, I understand the concept of frustration when a book is not written this way... Or anything in life for that matter!
ReplyDelete