Authors Electric

This month I'm sharing the info on my upcoming book launch. All are welcome! Here's the blurb from the Facebook event : Official launch of the Zombies v. Ninjas book series by R.A. Barnes, published by Kilkenny company Marble City Publishing and printed in Ireland. MC for the evening will be local author and Francis MacManus prize winner Patrick Griffith. This trilogy of paperbacks features characters that are surprisingly similar to the members of Evolution Martial Arts Academy as they battle to save Kilkenny, Ireland and the World from the Undead. Suitable for all ages from 10 to 110. Ruby Barnes and the Evolution Team members will be signing books on the night. All Marble City profits from the launch will go to Fundraising for Evolution Martial Arts Academy for the team to compete in America in 2017. More about the books here at rubybarnesbooks.com and I'll be writing a series of blog posts on that site about the background to the rise of the Undead i...

Since last month's blog post I haven't written a thing. The priorities have been elsewhere - reading the unpublished manuscript of a colleague and getting beaten up at karate. The manuscript reading went well and more will follow from Marble City Publishing on that account later this year. As for the karate beatings, that's the subject of this post. Our club, Evolution Martial Arts Academy in Kilkenny, competes in a variety of competitions. We do all kinds of stuff, ranging from traditional karate to demonstrations that are best described as a series of stunts you might see in a martial arts film. We also do creative forms, with or without weapons, to pieces of music that we choose ourselves. Another category we compete in is sparring, or fighting, and that's where the oldest ninja in town (yours truly) wheels himself out to do battle. Mr Incredible is me, of course (this is non-traditional garb, it was Halloween training). Over the past two or three years...

My twitterprofile claims I am the oldest ninja in town. There’s an element of truth to this. I’m currently three years into my fourth attempt this half-century to master karate. I’m not getting any faster, I’m not getting any more flexible, but I am getting stronger and more determined. After a year of practise with the katana (a two-handed sword beastie of the samurai variety) I did a solo performance at the club’s recent fundraising show in front of an audience of 300+. A lot of attacking imaginary opponents with three feet of polished nastiness, all to the tune of Prokofiev’s Montagues and Capulets (go to 1:39 and it’s from there) . It was a two hour programme and my mad frenzied attack was scheduled just before the interval. So how did it go? Almost immediately I was inexplicably out of my expected timing sequence with the music and the ponderous thump of that Montagues and Capulets section required me to strike, thrust, push imaginary dead bodies off the bla...