My first drafts for the bel dame books: God’s War, Infidel, and the third book, Babylon – which I’m working on now – are mainly just dialogue and fight scenes interspersed with copious amounts of whiskey drinking. My characters swill whiskey with the same frequency and fervor as other writers’ creations swill coffee.

Oh yes, I go back and add actual plot and worldbuilding and huge, glorious, bug-drenched descriptions later on, but that first draft is a slim jab-jab-cross-drink! exercise that serves to get the whole wild ride rolling.

But where, exactly, do all these fight scenes come from? Some of the most memorable scenes, and the ones that folks ask the most about, are the ones that take place in a boxing ring. Boxing is a favorite sport among magicians in the world of God’s War, and that’s not by accident.

I started taking boxing and mixed martial arts classes when I moved to Chicago. In part, this was in reaction to the time I’d spent in South Africa. Like most folks – women in particular – I’d grown up feeling some fear and apprehension about assault to my person, but I wasn’t nearly so aware of it in my home town or traipsing about Alaska as I was stepping through the 8 ft high security gates on a suburban home in Durban, South Africa. You just didn’t got outside at night alone. Not anywhere. Not even in the “nice” parts of town. You just… didn’t.

And… I fucking hated it.

I hated the lack of freedom. The admission of my own lack of physical power and confidence. Though there wasn’t much I could do if somebody shot me in the head, there certainly was something I could do to change my own feelings of confidence and power, so as soon as I could afford it, I signed up with POW Martial Arts in Chicago.

Now, I never did any serious sparring. I never went to class more than 2-3 times a week. And there were long stretches in there when I didn’t go at all, but for three or four years – on and off – I trekked downtown and punched bags and lifted weights and jumped rope. And when I was feeling especially virtuous, I’d jog a couple of miles twice a week until my lungs felt as if they would burst and I wanted to pound death into the pavement.

After six months of classes, I resolved to go jogging on the waterfront after dark. Not crazy dark, mind you, but certainly after dark, and headed out jogging in the cold and the dark with the music turned off just to experience the unabashed freedom of it all. Oh, certainly, if I’d been raped and killed there at 7:30 pm on a weekday, I’m sure folks would “blame” me for it just as they would have if I’d been at a club, or walking down a sidewalk, or anything else. But it wasn’t about risk or blame. It was about my own confidence. The chances of something terrible happening to me weren’t any greater after six months of mixed martial arts and boxing classes than they were before. What had changed was my attitude toward the world. My sense of self. My confidence in my ability to respond to a violent challenge.

When it came to writing God’s War, I used that same sense of power and confidence to build the heroines of my world. And I gave them a piece of myself with what I’d learned in the ring, too. They learned endurance. Perseverance. Power. And confidence.

When I write my fight scenes, I channel that sense of fear and power (getting hit in the face is a great motivator for not getting hit again). Generally, my biggest challenge is just making sure that the blocking is right – that when you throw a left hook and a right uppercut, that the punches are landing where they’re supposed to land and people are stumbling or retaliating accordingly. That’s tough. But the the feeling it gives you? The fight-or-flight, the desperate hiccuping exhaustion, the fall-down, give-out, too-fastness of it all? That I have some glancing association with.

For me, so much of fight scenes isn’t about the actual action – it’s about the way it makes people feel. Like a great sex scene, a good fight scene tells you more about the character than it does about the mechanics of the actual act. That’s what I aim for in my fight scenes (and my sex scenes)… what those experiences do to you, how they chance you, and how they change others.

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Congrats to Stina on Of Blood and Honey’s official publication! Comment on this post about your favorite fictional fights and get entered to win a copy of her book for FREE.