Martial Vitality

In this post I would like to share a few thoughts on self-publishing a book , in case anyone is considering that option. As I mentioned in my post on  burnout , one of my goals was to publish a book on a subject other than cyber security. A friend from my Krav Maga school, Anna Wonsley , learned that I had  published several books , and asked if we might collaborate on a book about stretching. The timing was right, so I agreed. I published my first book with Pearson and Addison-Wesley in 2004, and my last with No Starch in 2013. 14 years is an eternity in the publishing world, and even in the last 5 years the economics and structure of book publishing have changed quite a bit. To better understand the changes, I had dinner with one of the finest technical authors around,  Michael W. Lucas . We met prior to my interest in this book, because I had wondered about publishing books on my own. MWL started in traditional publishing like me, but has since become a full-time author and independ

Sunday I successfully passed my Graduate 1 ("G1") test within the Krav Maga Global system. I last tested for P5 in March 2018 . I wanted to share a few thoughts on how the test went. If you review the krav maga topic link on this blog you will find many posts about my training and philosophy. I started training in the Krav Maga Global system at First Defense Krav Maga in January 2016. My 2016 year in review and 2017 year in review posts document my Krav Maga training journey. As we near the end of 2018, however, I can note that as of this post I trained exactly 120 class hours at First Defense (29 prior to the P5 test and 91 prior to the G1 test), plus 3 hours during the summer in a seminar with master Eyal Yanilov . Thus far I am 6-for-6 with passing scores, having tested roughly every 6 months since starting at the school. The first exception was my P1 test, which occurred in April 2016, 4 months after I began training. The second exception was this G1 test. I had plan