Issue #007: Zen in the Art of Fighting

Welcome to the lucky number seventh edition of this road trip newsletter! Thank you for tuning into the latest and greatest from the front lines of my ambitions as a martial artist and author. I'm glad you're here and am exceptionally grateful for your support, interest, and investment in this journey.

If you’re new, welcome. If you’re not, welcome back! However we know each other or however you found this newsletter, I hope sharing some stories and thoughts on a monthly-or-more cadence will inspire you to find and follow some courageous and crazy dreams of your own.

If you'd like to catch up on the previous issues (especially if you missed the last one on account of a holiday hangover), you can check out the full newsletter archive here. You can also view this edition of the newsletter on the web if you don't want to keep reading from your email client. Please pardon any wonky formatting, image blips, or other slight bugs in between platforms.

Big thanks to ongoing Patreon supporters and new to the family

Thank you for backing me with your moral and monetary support, big and small. Big, big shoutout to Cary L. and Christina P. for joining the Patreon fold.

In case you're wondering how I'm using the Patreon funds to support the writing process: I've allocated the last few months' worth of patron contributions toward a ticket to the Southern California Writer's Conference in San Diego (Feb 18-20, 2022). It'll be my first writer's conference, and I'm told that conferences like these (especially for first-time authors) are among the best ways to network with fellow writers, meet with literary agents, and learn about the writing and publishing worlds from those who live in it and know it best. To those who have been contributing to Patreon, thank you for investing in me and allowing me to invest in this particular experience next month. I look forward to reporting back with how it all went.

If you'd like to join the Patreon crew and support the road trip and the "road" to becoming a published autho—all while unlocking exclusive content, special pieces of writing, and more—you can contribute here. Every cent counts.

Before we dive in...

If I were feeling cleverer this month, I'd find a way to theme this note after the James Bond movies in the spirit of Newsletter Issue #007 (e.g. look for grappling techniques in some of the series' most iconic fight sequences, write an entertaining analysis on whom I believe to be the best "Bond Girl" in the canon, or share my thoughts on seeing Thunderball for the first time about a month ago).

I'll table that vein of writing for another time if it's of interest to anyone other than myself. As far as self-indulgence goes, there are worse things I could do than scholarly-ish writing about James Bond movies and shows like Sex and the Cityand Yellowjackets (paywalled for Patreon supporters).

I digress.

This newsletter is a simple one broken up into three sections: life updates, training updates, and writing updates. Simple is often better, if not best. In a future where I aspire to pop out two of these newsletters a month rather than one, one note a month will be structured in this update format (life/training/writing) and the other will be a longer-form piece of writing or reflection about the trip, which, as a newsletter subscriber, you get first dibs when it comes to reading.

Without further ado...

Life Updates

How I Spent the First Days of the New Year

Bug and I rang in the new year in the Gaslamp District of San Diego. I would not recommend this experience to you unless you are the kind of person who enjoys the energy and the experience akin to Times Square on New Year's Eve. Personally, my tolerance is pretty low when it comes to crowded streets, drunken kids, and overpriced food in the spirit of sending the previous year out with a bang. On December 31, 2021, I was fresh off a long flight back from the east coast, and the experience of Gaslamp was maddening. In hindsight though, it's hilarious to think about the C-List Jon Hamm of a maitre'd nearly getting into a fight with a drunken kid in his twenties outside of Saltwater on Sixth Avenue (despite the restaurant's website's claims, it is definitely not "the best seafood in San Diego.")

We spent the next two days moving into our new Airbnb, which is only 8 minutes' walking distance away from the old apartment but feels like worlds apart. The apartment is the embodiment of Murphy's Law (something new breaks once a week) and the neighborhood is significantly grittier. January in Southern California is idyllic, especially after decades of waking up to East Coast Winters, but the "sunshine tax" comes with its share of s--- on the sidewalk (animal and human, unfortunately). The best thing about the new apartment is the proximity to a grocery store and a really good pizza restaurant. San Diego's TNT Pizza isn't Austin's Via 313, but it cracks my personal 'Top 3' for gluten-free pizza.

My Mom's Visit to San Diego and an Inspiring Breakfast

My mother came to visit San Diego during the first week of January. It was her first time in San Diego and she really enjoyed the visit. We had a bunch of nice outings together and I took her to all the favorite spots I'd planned on having her visit: Encinitas, Little Italy, Coronado, and La Jolla.

*Dinner in Little Italy with my mom. Only regrets from the visit: I don't have enough pictures of us together.*

The highlight of my mom's visit, (for both of us, I think), was a breakfast at a place called Morning Glory. If you check out the pictures of it, the restaurant looks like totally bougie, basic BS that was made for Instagram. It is a place so highly hyped that people start queuing for the restaurant for up to an hour before it opens on the weekends. Though two friends of mind had strongly recommended Morning Glory to me, I had little desire to go because of my skepticism around its hype. But I'd wanted to take my mom to the Farmer's Market that's right next to the restaurant, and my mom, having looked up the place for herself, wanted to go to Morning Glory. So I relented and we went.

I stood in the line for Morning Glory at 7:30AM on a Saturday morning—and with low expectations. The pink aesthetic of the place reminded me of cotton candy, and I expected the restaurant to be similar to cotton candy in character: fluffy, superficial, saccharine, and unsatisfying. I was beyond wrong and beyond impressed. I've never seen food, environment, and service operations interact so harmoniously and so expertly for a fairly-casual breakfast spot. The food, the quality of service, and attention to detail were outstqanding. It wasn't just a meal—it was a full-on experience. (I cringe a little bit saying this, but it's true). I left inspired by the leopard-shirt-and-overalls uniforms, the mirrored ceiling tiles, the embroidered napkins, and poignant messages at the bottom of the plates. I'm salivating at the thought of the pork belly fried rice and the vanilla latte I enjoyed out of a veritable goblet. The only place I'd rank more highly for breakfast food on this trip is Cafe Kacao in Oklahoma City (the food of which is good enough to have made me consider flying out for a small-or-nonexistent division in the IBJJF Oklahoma City Open).

*I was informed that Ray Kroc lifted this from Calvin Coolidge, but all the same: the pancakes and the venue in which they were consumed were inspiring.*

Training Updates

Re-Evaluating the 'Why' and Rightsizing Training vs Writing Goals

Initially, I was going to write this whole newsletter around the experience of preparing for a competition I had this weekend and some reflections I had after it. There was some good stuff in that chunk of writing, which I started on Friday, but it ended up getting very long (even by my own standards), and there are still some ideas I'm working through in order to make it shine. If it doesn't make it into a future newsletter, it's likely to become a piece of a book chapter.

In short, my "why" for competing, in particular, has changed significantly, and I've been analyzing the reasons I used to compete and the reasons why I choose to compete (or not compete) now. Among other things, I realize that I've used competing as a way to procrastinate on writing, and that I need to make some tradeoffs on training and competition if I had any hope of reaching my bigger goals around writing and publishing.

What this means is that right now, I'm "keeping the lights on" when it comes to training. By "keeping the lights on," I mean that I'm still learning a lot, still training regularly throughout the week, but am being strategic when it comes to how I spend my training time: I am making the most of training at an elite jiu-jitsu academy with a stellar environment, teaching resouces, and training partners, but I am not doing every class I possibly could, and am not flying across the country to do tournaments for the foreseeable future (unless I hit certain writing milestones).

Given the ultimatum, I'd rather have a #1 best-selling memoir than a #1 ranking among Adult Purple Belt Females (the latter, in the grand scheme of jiu-jitsu, doesn't mean terribly much, and in the grand scheme of life, means even less). The way I was spending my time, until maybe a week ago, wasn't fully reflecting that prioritization. I've made some adjustments accordingly.

Other perks about competing less actively and training more sanely: not having to worry about making weight all the time and getting to enjoy more of Bug's creativity in the kitchen. This was a noteworthy breakfast sandwich for two.

Writing Updates

Noteworthy Reading and Recent Influences on Writing: David Goggins and Nora Ephron

I can't find the precise quotation from Jorge Luis Borges or Philip Roth or some other writer I look up to, but I'm pretty sure that one or more of those writers has said that being a good writer demands being a good reader. Taking that wisdom to heart, I've been doing my best to read as much as possible in my non-writing, non-training time. In January, I finished reading "Can't Hurt Me" by Navy SEAL and ultra-racer, David Goggins, and "Heartburn" by Nora Ephron: two very different books, both of which I enjoyed greatly, and for very different reasons.

I read "Can't Hurt Me" at the recommendation of a training partner who follows David Goggins and is a subscriber to his brand of "no excuses" mentality when it comes to pushing oneself. Reading through some of Goggins' social media and hearing a few of his stories prior to reading his book (e.g. running a hundred miles on broken legs), I expected the book to be a tougher version of some Tony Robbins-style self-help. I found it to be more insightful and vulnerable than I'd predicted, with not as much "breaking his arm while patting himself on the back" kind of self-congratulatory writing as I'd expected. For all the "Can't Hurt Me" and "becoming hard" kind of ethos for which Goggins is known, he shows an unexpected deal of vulnerability and humility, especially when talking about his childhood and about the moments in which his body (finally) shuts down after being pushed to the brink.

Reading "Can't Hurt Me" gave me a good perspective on how to tell my own story in a way that is relatable: on the surface, the story of a privileged woman with immense academic and corporate pedigree who trains jiu-jitsu is not a broadly relatable one. Moreover, I've been told for years that I come off as intimidating to other people (at first, at least), that my standards are too high (for myself and others), and my discipline (more perceived than real) is unattainable. But if Goggins can overcome a relatability gap, then so can I. I venture to say that anything I've done in my career and in training jiu-jitsu is significantly more attainable than just about anything that Goggins has done: enduring three SEAL "Hell Weeks", running ultramarathons, breaking a world record for pull ups, and becoming a wildfire firefighter, to name a few of his accomplishments.

Another cool thing about reading Goggins and other Navy literature while living in San Diego: getting to run along the waterfront areas where you'll see lots of Navy ships, museums, history, and photo ops like these.

Unlike David Goggins' work, which I only recently read, I've known about Nora Ephron's work for years. You probably have, too, even if you don't know her by name. She's clever, humorous, and heartfelt in her writing, both in her published prose and in the dialogue of her screenplays: she's most famous for being the writer behind "Julie and Julia," "Sleepless in Seattle," "You've Got Mail," and "When Harry Met Sally."

I stumbled upon "Heartburn" at a discount bookstore near the gym and learned that it's one of Nora Ephron's only works of fiction (though it is inspired by her own life). Most of her other books are collections of essays, and the vast majority of her fictional opus is what she's put onscreen in movies like "When Harry Met Sally." "Heartburn" is about a Jewish New York, cookbook author who is seven months' pregnant when she finds out that her husband, a political journalist, is cheating on her. While I relate to none of the plot, reading "Heartburn" gave me a few ideas about how to write about difficult topics—from the trip, in jiu-jitsu, and from my life more broadly—with a sense of levity. Spoonful of sugar with the medicine and whatnot. Ephron also writes really well about being Jewish and from the tri-state area in a way that's funny and comprehensible rather that dull and alienating—another thing I'm going for in my own writing.

On Prioritizing and Redirecting Efforts within Writing: All in on the Book Proposal

When I considered New Year's Resolutions with regard to my writing, one was getting on a weekly cadence of publishing something publicly. I came pretty close to it this month if you count two posts on Patreon (free and paywalled) and this newsletter. The piece of writing I had intended to publish out in the third week of January (a YouTube video essay) is still in the works: the script is written, but parts of the audio need to be re-recorded and the video pieces are more labor-intensive than expected.

Howeover, by the end of January, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed New Year's ambition evaporated, and a sense of real priorities kicked in: both the priorities between writing and jiu-jitsu, and priorities among types of writing. In the last week, in particular, I've been redirecting my efforts toward the writing goal that matters the most: the book proposal. I came to the conclusion that the thing I most want this year is a book deal (or my best shot at one), but that none of my writing was focused on the one thing that can get me a traditional book deal: my book proposal. A book proposal gets you an agent. An agent gets you a book deal. Plain and simple. No way around it.

My mornings, these days, have been less spent on extended versions of Julia Cameron-inspired "morning pages" and, instead, have been cranking out first drafts of the hardest, most tactical sections of the book proposal (e.g. audience, marketing plan, annotated table of contents, etc.) These are the pieces I'd been putting off the most from the proposal because I was self-conscious about writing something that sucked, as these pieces of the proposal inevitably would.

I'm embarrassed to say that I've had a book proposal draft since August, did some work on sample chapters in December, but had avoided these tactical sections for nearly six months. Only now am I "eating the frog," going after them, and embracing the suck.

I hate first drafts. First drafts suck. They suck to write and they suck to read. But there's no way around them.

*Words to remember. Props to my home coach for sharing this with me today. Exceptionally timely.*

The investment in the Southern California Writers' Conference (mentioned earlier in this newsletter) is as much an investment in my writing career/network and publishing ambitions as it is a forcing fuction. The conference deadline lights an enormous fire under my ass to complete the book proposal. I refuse to go to that conference with anything but a proposal and pitch that might not be perfectly polished, but is something I'm proud to present and sell.

Unexpected Sources of Writing Inspiration and TOOL(s) of the Trade

Mid-month, I went to a very trippy rock concert (TOOL, for those who know and love them). Swaying amid the weed-addled, aging concert attendees and stepping my way up and down the sticky stadium floors of San Diego State University, I came up with the perfect title for the book. I still need the subheadline, but I've started investing in search keywords. Stay tuned.

Closing Out

I can't believe it's Feburary on Tuesday. I hope you enjoy some discounted chocolate and roses come February 15 and come roaring into the Year of the Tiger.

Thank you for riding along in the metaphorical passenger seat of this post-employment, itinerant athletic and author-ly journey. If you’re at leisure to write back, I’d love to know:

What's the most fun you've had since 2022 started? Any good snow sculptures or snow angels, east coasters?

As I think about audience and marketing plan for my book proposal, who do you think would enjoy reading what I'm writing? How would you describe that 'who' and how can I reach that 'who'? In broad strokes, I would not describe the book I am writing as a jiu-jitsu book: I would describe it as a memoir about leaving a settled, successful, but unfulfilling life, embarking on a transformational journey of self-discovery by way of a cross-country road trip, and learning from the pursuit of an irrational and difficult passion to its highest level possible. "Eat, Pray, Love" with a combat sports edge.

Until next time,

EZ

PS: Because no newsletter is complete without a Snick pic, here's the "degenerate doxie" herself in a hat that I bought for her at Daiso (Japanese dollar store-style chain). She sounds like a piggy when she snores. Now she has the headwear to match the snoring.