We are continuing our Squishing Gender-Stereotypes Program with a guest post by Bailey Knight. As you may know, my novel Fierce released on 8/14/14. Fierce is a contemporary sports fiction with romance elements, focused on mixed martial arts (MMA). You can read more on Fierce HERE
To celebrate the release, I'm hosting some awesome interviews and guests posts that look at women in male-dominated areas, gender-stereotypes, and, truly, people with passion. Yesterday, my friend Carrie Butler discussed shooting in an amusing but honest post. Today, my friend and CP Bailey Knight discusses her two passions--ballet and co-ed soccer--and how they work together, how they work for her, and what being a girl in these areas means to her.

Tights & Cleats
Bailey Knight

If you’ve been following any of the promotional hype for L.G. Kelso’s Fierce, you have read some great blog posts and tweets and reviews about how different this novel is from others in the contemporary sports genre. And I am honored that L asked me to write a guest post discussing my passion for sport and my experiences as a female athlete. So much of Tori’s narrative resonated with me because she is continuously navigating her own womanhood, and being a competitive athlete.


Too often, being a woman and being an athlete seem to be two incongruous identities. I am a woman. I am an athlete. By being one and the other, you lessen your identity as both.


But I am a woman, and I am an athlete. Both are inseparable from how I see myself, how I understand who I am and how I exist every day. For me, the disharmony between my womanhood and my athleticism is exemplified by my two athletic outlets: ballet and co-ed, competitive soccer.


In one, I am centered in my body; I stretch up through my toes, my ankles, my legs, my core, and out through my arms. I pirouette and promenade steadily on my tip-toes; my adagio is graceful and strong; petite allegro is fast and precise. In the other, I am a teammate; I play shoulder-to-shoulder with men and women; I take hard tackles to my ankles, swift kicks to my shins, and balls to the head; I make swift sprints and quick turns and sure passes.


Both require me to be aware of and in control of my body -- of my legs and their strength, their speed and agility -- and I am aware of how my life-long soccer player body affects my newly trained dancer’s body.


I originally took up dance to help me heal a soccer injury that had flared up during the season; my doctor recommended something that would strengthen and stretch my Achilles, ankles, and feet. But I fell for the strength, awareness, and control that ballet dancing demands of me. Beyond the three hours you can surely find me in studio every week, if I’m standing, I’m working my feet, my ankles, and my legs through stretching; I tendu and plie over standing still.


While ballet is still a new athletic outlet, I haven’t been doing anything else in my life as long as I’ve played soccer. Except maybe reading. I played through childhood, into middle school and high school. I continued with pick-up games throughout college; unable to step away from a ball too long, even if it was just on a patch of grass between dorm buildings in tennis shoes or barefooted. When I moved after college to a town with an impressive and competitive adult soccer league, my friends and I turned our weekly Sunday pick-up games into a team. We play three seasons a year, twelve games per season. Playing in a co-ed division, we’re only required to field two female players at a time, but our team is evenly divided male and female. The men on our team didn’t seek out some girl friends to play just to meet the division requirements; the women are a strong, respected, and strategic force to be reckoned with on our team.


Lacing up my cleats every week for a game or practice is more than stepping into a pair of shoes; it’s stepping into a core component of myself. And on the nights I’m not on a grass field, I’m slipping my feet into pale, pink ballet slippers. I know myself outside, on a field, and I find myself inside, on wooden floors.


Yet, neither seems to align with my identity as a woman.


When I tell people I dance ballet, they look immediately to my body. I get the awkward, lingering up-and-down gaze from everyone. It’s intrusive. I have been a soccer player for twenty-two years, and my body shape reflects this: I have shorter legs and wider hips and bigger boobs than a dancer should. While all these natural curves will prevent me from ever being a competitive dancer -- along with, you know, not ever taking dance before I was twenty-three -- they don’t decrease my ability to dance, and dance well, and to be absolutely in love with dancing.


Of course, when I tell people that I play competitive soccer, and co-ed at that, I get shocked and slightly horrified looks. I can read the But why? in their expressions. Don’t I get hurt? Aren’t I afraid of the men? Aren’t the men just better than me? Am I embarrassed playing against men? Let me just tell you this, as an answer to all of the above: thanks to my refined skill at making tackles and a basic understanding of physics, I have flipped a man over me to win the ball in a completely legal challenge. I play in a co-ed adult league, so sure, I play with the boys, and it’s competitive and it’s rough, but being a man doesn’t give a person a natural, innate ability to play sports.


Just like being a woman doesn’t create a limit on a person’s ability to achieve excellence in athletics; to be truly passionate about something physically demanding.


I have never known myself as someone other than Bailey, the soccer player, voracious reader, daydreamer and storyteller. I committed myself to this sport at the same time I committed myself to reading books and writing stories; and like everything about myself, these identities are enhanced by my identity as a woman. As an adult, I added ballet dancer to that list of identities, but I feel it as a part of myself as surely as the others. All of these identities help me find my center, and they are inseparable from the base fact that I am a woman. I am a woman athlete. It’s that simple and that complex.

Note from LG: Thank you, B, for sharing two of your passions with us and helping celebrate passion, and women in athletics. 

My name is Carrie, and I’m addicted to targets.

No, no... not Target. I like the big box retailer as much as the next girl, but I’m talking about the things you aim projectiles at. (What can I say? I’m goal-oriented.)

Targets give us what life doesn’t—clarity. There’s no second-guessing as to whether or not you’re getting better, and success is easy to identify. It’s all laid out in colorful rings before you. Plus, they act as great stress relievers. Had a bad day at work? Go drill a zombie cut-out for an hour. You’ll feel better! ;)

But seriously, there’s a reason I don’t broadcast my interests very often. Being a woman in a male-dominated activity comes with unique challenges and assumptions. Here are five of the most ugh-worthy:

5. Now that The Hunger Games is popular, doing archery automatically gets you accused of playing Katniss—even if you’ve been shooting for years.

4. Telling someone you like to throw knives earns you a suggestion to dress up like <insert objectified lady assassin character here>, because “it would be hot”.

3. You can’t say, “I like to blow darts” without someone raising a suggestive eyebrow.

2. When a guy walks into a gun store, he’s treated like a buddy—an equal; when you walk into a gun store, you’re shown small caliber revolvers with pink grips and warned not to point them at anyone.

1. Guys can go pee while concealed carrying with no problem; you have to hold your gun(s) whilst on the toilet and pray no one glances through the stall crack!

Yeah, that last one is gross, but true. Think about it the next time you’re at the mall and have to pee. LOL

Anyway, at the end of the day, I like what I like. I’m not going to let people’s comments keep me from enjoying it. How about you? :)

Question:

What’s something you do that’s dominated by the opposite sex?


Carrie Butler is the author of the Mark Of Nexus Series (paranormal NA!), Co-founder of NA Alley and owner of Forward Authority (Design Services).

WEBSITE  |  TWITTER  |  FACEBOOK  |  NA ALLEY  |  DESIGN SITE

Note from LG: Thanks, Carrie, for stopping by and helping celebrate Fierce's release!

I am so excited to continue celebrating Fierce's release with a wonderful guest post from the lovely and talented Diana Gallagher. Since Fierce  is an MMA sports romance novel (you can read more about it at the bottom of the this post), I'm celebrating the release with two weeks of interviews and guest posts from various athletes. 
Diana is a talented writer, a talented critiquer, and the equivalent of #teamdangerzone's dance mom (er, make that gymnastics mom!). 
Let's get to this fabulous post, shall we?
-LG 

By Diana Gallagher

One of my favorite things about Tori, the protagonist of FIERCE, is that she refuses to bend to gender expectations when it comes to what a female athlete can and can’t handle. She’s tough, she can be abrasive, and she’s unafraid to push her body to its limits.


Give her the option to slack? Tell her to do one thing while her male training partners do something else? Yeah, not happening. It’s a spirit that I try to instill in the athletes I coach.


“Strength time,” I call out, and all of my gymnasts groan. So it goes – an inevitable part of competitive sports, albeit not the most thrilling.


I instruct them to gather around for a push-up circle. After much elbowing and lying on their bellies, waiting for the last possible moment to get into position, we begin. I let each girl come up with their own variation, and so we run through the gamut: regular, diamond, wide arm, handstand--


They’re nearly silent now, faces red but elbows bending and straightening with precision. I’m starting to get a little self-congratulatory (look how strong they’re getting!). That’s when someone pops the question.


“Can we do girl push-ups?”


“Yeah, can we?” another pipes in.


Uh-oh.


The flip side to gymnastics is that the women’s side is far more popular than the men’s. There are more collegiate women’s teams, and come the Olympics, you can bet that girls tumbling on floor exercise will draw in higher ratings than their male counterparts.  There’s not a sense of “Man’s Sport” versus “Lite Sport.” When it comes to gymnastics, it seems to be a generally acknowledged truth that men do crazy hard skills, women do crazy hard skills, and sometimes, they do the same ones. (In fact, it’s argued that the McKayla Maroney’s vault in the 2012 Olympic team finals was even better than the one performed by men’s all-around champion Kohei Uchimura – who competed the same vault.)


But that question sets me back on my heels.


I get that they’re tired. There’s nothing wrong with such an intermediate push-up – I’ve assigned them to athletes recovering from injury. But the fact that it’s “easier” with the moniker “girl” attached doesn’t sit well with me. There shouldn’t be the sense that what girls do is an out, a stepping stone, a not-quite-there.



 “You’re gymnasts,” I say instead. “You do gymnast push-ups.” Which means they’ll keep their legs off of the ground, thank you very much. 


Diana Gallagher is a gymnastics coach, writing professor, and country music aficionado. WHAT HAPPENS IN WATER, her contemporary YA novel about a girl afraid to take risks after a gymnastics injury, releases in 2015 (Spencer Hill Contemporary).


Find Diana on:
Twitter | Add WHAT HAPPENS IN WATER to your Goodreads | Blog

From L.G.
THANKS, DIANA!

Today, I have Carrie Butler, author of the Mark of Nexus series (which you all should read) sharing her writing challenge. And, you'll see why she's a good friend of mine (we share a similar definition of action)....

Running Out of Steam

Is anyone else feeling the pressure?


When I first started writing and fighting for NA, it was fine to publish a paranormal romance series on the PG-13 end of the spectrum. New Adult fiction was only limited by the life stage of the protagonist, and agents/editors weren’t interested in the category yet. What was the risk?

Enter: The Snowball Effect

► Several NA contemporary romance titles hit the big time in 2012.

►That success triggered a slew of coattail novels—each seemingly steamier than the last.

(I have no problem with this. I’m just giving a gist of the timeline.)

►Sensationalist media stories deemed NA nothing but ‘sexed-up’ YA, reshaping its initial definition.

►Consumers reinforced that notion by purchasing semi-erotic NA contemporary romance in masses.

►Many came to expect steam in their NA novels—some are even going so far as to take stars away for lack of sexual content.

So, now I’m feeling the heat. (Hah! Heat.) If I force myself to write a steamy contemporary, I know I’ll reach more readers. I’ll get to share my love of storytelling with a broader audience and provide them with a fun literary escape. But can I do that?

*Sigh* No, no I can’t...

My imagination doesn’t go there. I daydream about supernatural battles and banter-driven relationships. When I hear about characters getting action, I assume it’s a kick to the face. I mean, the handcuffs in my books belong to hostages, for cryin’ out loud!

Don’t get me wrong. My characters do give in to their urges from time to time; it’s just that the story doesn’t linger there. So, is there still a place on the New Adult shelf for me? Have I spent years fighting for a category that no longer represents my work? Who knows.

If other genres within the NA category don’t take off, I may have to reconsider rebranding my series—and that’s okay. Readers have the freedom to choose which books they prefer and the power to determine trends. I’m merely here to entertain, regardless of what banner I do that under. :)

Question: Have you ever felt pressure due to your category or genre?


About Carrie:
Carrie daydreamed her way through college—until they thrust a marketing degree into her hands, slapped a summa cum laude seal on the corner, and booted her out into a less-than-stellar job market. Instead of panicking at the prospect of unemployment, she used her Midwestern logic to steer into the skid and point her life in the direction she really wanted to go: writing out those daydreams.

Her passion for New Adult fiction led her to co-found NA Alley—one of the first websites dedicated to the category. A year later, she started a design business specializing in graphics for the publishing industry, called Forward Authority. Her Mark of Nexus series has appeared on Amazon bestselling, top-rated, and hot new release lists in various genres.

I'm continuing my Writer's Challenge week with a guest post from one of my best friends and critique partner, Bailey M. K. Knight. I'm always excited to get Bailey's thoughts, so let's get to it:


What is my biggest challenge with writing? Solitary confinement & personal encouragement.


Okay, so that’s two, but I’ll break it down.


(1)


There is a misconception about the kind of person who wants to be a writer:


Writers must enjoy solitude and being still. Writers must be the kind of person who can sit at a computer (or with a notebook) for hours on end, with no break, and feel satisfied through the interaction of their characters.


To an extent, that’s true. I am certainly captivated by the world of my characters and their movement through it; it’s why when I put aside novel writing to focus on graduate school, the story never left my mind.


But I am crap with solitude and sitting still.


I survived paper-writing weeks in graduate school by getting together every day with other students and writing furiously around a table or three pushed together. By taking breaks to share the best and worst sentences composed in the previous hour of work; to share breakthroughs and commiserate over, “I now hate this topic, and it’s still due on Thursday!”; to throw Cheerios into my friend’s hoodie across the table (in public), and get scolded by another friend about “picking those up off the floor!”


For me, writing has to be as social and interactive as anything else in my life. I’m an introvert with an insatiable need to spend time with the people who inspire my productivity and creativity. I am motivated by their own successes and struggles with writing and art; not all of my “productive” friends are writers nor are they all artists, but they are all creative.


This is not to say I am incapable of writing alone. I am writing this post alone. But even then, only sort of. I keep checking back in with L. on Twitter, and talking about the challenges of writing this post at all.


I like to touch base about writing, about my productivity or lack thereof. Usually the latter. Which leads into my second writing challenge: personal encouragement.


(2)


All writers are their own worst critic. Well, really, that’s a human thing, but in this case we’re talking about writing. Being my own worst critic is not a surprise, nor does it make me any kind of special. But it also doesn’t mean my own self critique isn’t crippling to my writing; I’m not immune to self-sabotage.


The truth I believe about my writing is this: I am a very strong academic writer. I am good at arguing points in academic papers, at composing articles about public knowledge creation. My first drafts are still crap, but I know the end result is going to be good and meaningful and insightful and inspiring. Which doesn’t mean I don’t struggle with academic writing, or believe I have no more room for improvement -- because I do. I still fail at academic writing sometimes, but on the whole, I am a successful academic.


As with the “creative writing” world, “Publish or perish” is alive and well and running the show in academia. But I’ve met that goal there. I’ve been published.


So this is the second truth I believe about my writing: I am a better academic writer than creative writer. The use of “better” here is important and purposeful because somehow my belief that I am better at one prevents me from becoming better at the other.


To make an analogy out of academic writing and creative writing, being good at both is like being ambidextrous. They are so very similar and noticeably different. Creative writing feels awkward and clunky to me right now; I’m translating some skills through a new outlet while also learning different skills, too.


In the first case, I embrace that I need camaraderie with writing while acknowledging that I need to also embrace the solitude a little more. I schedule one or two writing dates with others a week; sometimes these are online, or in person with academic friends, or sometimes it’s just with my husband and I, him studying and me writing. But when others aren’t around, I still have to be productive. I have to be productive for myself and by myself.


In the second case, this is the first year where I’ve only had to worry about and focus on creative writing. I am writing a novel on my own (affectionately known as that ghost story for now), and I’m writing a novel with my friend Jordyn (@jordynface on Twitter), and both are helping me relearn writing-as-storytelling. While I still think my writing trends towards awkward, I have realized that some of my academic writing habits serve me very well in novel writing. Taking time to revise while I write, to fix clunky narration or dragging exposition, helps me feel more confident about the writing to come. Some of my writing habits are cited as “do not do” on the creative-side of things, but they are my writing habits and I trust in them; in turn, I’m remembering how to trust my writing.

Yesterday, I had author and #teamdangerzone mentor Diana Gallagher on the blog to talk about challenges with edits. Today, I'm getting to introduce you to a beautiful essay written by a fellow #teamdangerzone writer, Neely Simpson. 
Neely writes beautiful, lyrical pieces and I'm super excited that I finally have my hands on her MS. 

Gird Up Your Loins

By Neely Stansell-Simpson

I never intended to become a writer. In fact, I intended to become a pastor, but somewhere in the midst of that journey the call to write snuck up from behind, clubbed me over the head, and dragged me off by my hair. Like so many irrational human beings who have come before me, I developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome and fell in love with my captor. Because I was on the path to clergy-hood when I was so rudely redirected by writing, I tend to view writing through the lens of theology, which at its heart is ultimately about stories.

In his book Whistling in the Dark, Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite theologians, writes, "'Darkness was upon the face of the deep,' Genesis says. Darkness was where it all started. Before darkness, there had never been anything other than darkness, void and without form." Three of the world's great religions -- Islam, Judaism, and Christianity -- share basically the same creation story. It should be noted that these three religions also regard time as linear unlike their Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain counterparts, which regard time as cyclical. So, in terms of our storytelling heritage, this idea that creation begins in the dark, while not universal, is prevalent. More importantly, the narrative of creativity being born out of darkness can be considered one of our world's sacred stories.

Darkness. That's where my writing journey began in earnest. I always wanted to be a writer, but somewhere along the way I convinced myself that I couldn't do it. Being a writer seemed like being an astronaut; something amazing other people did, but which someone like me only watched on TV. However, in 2008 the Great Economic Kerfuffle came charging in and knocked me on my ass. I was nine months pregnant and in the midst of a huge identity crisis when the funding for my job dried up just in time for my mother to be diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer. Up until that point in my life, I had been the family breadwinner, but now I was needed at home to help care for my mother. With a suddenness that still makes my head spin, I found myself the stay-at-home mother of an infant daughter and the stay-at-home daughter of a very sick mother.

Everyone says you should never, ever quit your job in order to take up writing, but no one has advice about what to do when your job quits you, and you find that writing has taken you up as a hobby. That's what happened to me, and I didn't know what else to do, but wing it. I turned to writing, not to achieve literary greatness, but to stay sane and to carve out some small place within myself that could be wholly mine in the midst of a life that had become an unexpected, miserable mess. I've been fighting for that place inside myself ever since, advancing slowly on wobbly, malnourished legs like a third-rate, ragtag army, but advancing never the less. And what have I learned about writing during my feeble advance through the dark? Just like life, writing is hard and complex and almost never turns out quite like you expect, or like you would like for it to. So, why are life and writing so damn hard? For two main reasons, I think -- vulnerability and shame.

Writer and shame researcher, Brené Brown says, "The word courage comes from the Latin word cor meaning heart. When the word first entered the English language it meant to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart . . . I have come to believe vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage . . . to create is to make something that has never existed before. There's nothing more vulnerable than that." Brown goes on to say that vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity, innovation, and change. However, in order to talk about vulnerability, indeed in order to embrace vulnerability, we have to talk about shame, which she defines as the swampland of the soul. Shame is that feeling of not being good enough, and we all wrestle with it. You know the vulture-like shame demons that circle overhead. They look like this and worse: Who am I to write? What do I know? This story is really stupid, and everyone is going to hate it. I’m really stupid. I'm going to look like a fool. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. In order to write, we have to gather all of our courage, push through the shame, and embrace vulnerability. In other words, we have to say to ourselves, "Yes, it is entirely possible that this story sucks, but I'm going to write it and put it out there anyway, because there is no other way to create something wonderful other than to grope awkwardly through the darkness with the courage to create something crappy."

Based on over a decade of research on shame and vulnerability, Brown says the only thing that separates the people who struggle with shame and those who are able to move past it to embrace vulnerability, is a sense of worthiness. They understand that despite all of their shortcomings, they are worthy of love and belonging. What that means for us as writers is that we must believe that no matter who we are, no matter what credentials we do or do not hold, we have a story to tell. There is going to be a lot of struggle and hard work and sifting through crap involved in telling that story, but we're worthy of telling it.

But they're incredibly seductive, those demons, and I'll be honest. There are days I just can't win against them. Those are the days I spend hunting for any distraction I can find, because I can't bear to stumble around in the dark with only that daunting blank page and my insecurities for company. Those are the days when I try to convince myself to give up writing altogether, and find something easier and more lucrative to do.

Fortunately, I win against the demons more often than I lose. However, I've found that winning is about learning to redefine success. For me, success looks like the days when I manage to add a few more terrible paragraphs to a first draft. Success is letting go of the creative process all of the rulebooks say you should have, and laying claim to the creative process that is authentically yours. Success is swapping manuscripts with a critique partner, and being privileged to be among the first people to see the creation that has emerged from their journey through darkness. Success is receiving a rejection letter from an agent you respect saying he really liked your book just not quite enough to represent it, and to please send more of your work to him in the future. Success is learning to quit comparing yourself to other writers. Success is finding joy and meaning in your work.

In his book, Whistling in the Dark, Frederick Buechner draws a parallel between the darkness and subsequent light at the beginning of Genesis and a story from the Christian narrative in the book of John. I don't think you have to be a religious person to find meaning in the story. After all that's what we writers do, isn't it? We look for meaning in the stories around us.

It’s a story that takes place after the crucifixion of Jesus while his bereft companions are out fishing at night. They're grieving the violent death and painful loss of their friend. Their future is uncertain and frightening; most of their hopes and dreams have been dashed to pieces. And to make matters even worse, they can't even catch one damn fish. They're hungry and grumpy and tired and scared, but as dawn begins to take the edge off of the pitch-blackness of the night, they can see that someone is on the beach cooking breakfast over a charcoal fire.

Buechner writes, "The darkness of Genesis is broken by God in great majesty speaking the word of creation. 'Let there be light!' That's all it took. But the darkness of John is broken by the flicker of a charcoal fire on the sand. Jesus has made it. He cooks some fish on it for his old friends' breakfast . . . The original creation of light itself is almost too extraordinary to take in. The little cook-out on the beach is almost too ordinary to take seriously." And then Buechner says something that you and I, as writers would do well to listen to. He says, "By sheltering a spark with a pair of cupped hands and blowing on it, the Light of the World gets enough of a fire going to make breakfast. It's not apt to be your interest in cosmology or even in theology that draws you to it so much as it's the empty feeling in your stomach. You don't have to understand anything very complicated. All you're asked is to take a step or two forward through the darkness and start digging in."

Gird up your loins my writer friends. Creation starts in the darkness. The extraordinary is rooted in the ordinary. It's hard and maddening and the vulnerability it takes can be agonizing, but don't give up. Move forward on your wobbly, malnourished legs knowing you are worthy of the story that is yours to write. Call upon all of the courage you have, face that blank page with all its demons, and tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.