Dispatch from the Razor's Edge, the Blog of Michael Stephen Fuchs
2008.07.31 : The Price of Glory
Plus Erin On My Lap, On My Desk
Plus "I Have Made Fire"
"You said, 'There's a third wind.' You said, 'Kid, there's a third wind. It's between here and death. Don't be afraid. Go on ahead and grab ahold. The third wind. It's all yours.' "
- Thom Jones, Rocket Man

It will not have passed the notice of regular readers that I have taken up boxing. I've mentioned that the weekday sessions are fairly light-hearted (if not painless); but that the Saturday sparring sessions can be pretty brutal. Here are some results from my latest sparring session. This one came from blocking flurries of right-hand body blows – in an exercise in "defending ourselves" in which our trainer put one of us in a corner of the ring, forbid us from throwing any punches, and let another guy whale on us for a few minutes at a time. Ouchers.

This was from actual ring-time. Not sure if my opponent got a left hand up inside of my headgear somehow; or whether he just hit the corner so damned hard it didn't matter. In any case, the full area between my eyelid and eyebrow was a rich purple for about a week.


This is my sister Erin, upon my lap, upon my desk. (The bone? Oh, that's just a little something I picked up in the Okavango Delta.)

This last item requires significant annotation. First of all, I absolutely do not smoke. (I'm a vegan, exercise fanatic, seed-eating health nut – remember?) But way back in the day, we would indulge in clove cigarettes now and again, because they were tasty, and we were naughty, and they had an uncanny ability to bring a fading buzz back to life. In more recent years, on occasion, when depression, and the concomitant desire for oblivion, however temporary, have gotten hold of me to the point that drinking just doesn't do it, I'd go out and get a pack of cloves. Happened maybe two or three times in the last six years. My last pack has lasted me about eight months now. But, if I have some lying around, every once in a blue moon, when I'm drinking, I'll get a hankering for one. (Again – those 20 clove cigarettes have lasted me eight months, and counting.) It's probably a measure of how infrequent an indulgence this is that, on this occasion, it was found that there was no method of creating fire in the house. So I went with the never-popular get-something-lit-off-the-stove-burner method. (Which method has resulted in my friend Matt having cause to point out that nothing is so annoying to a roommate as a guy running around the house, in the middle of the night, screaming, with his head on fire.) Anyway.

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about
close photo of Michael Stephen Fuchs

Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels – D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some very  long  walks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

You can reach him on .

THE MANUSCRIPT by Michael Stephen Fuchs
PANDORA'S SISTERS by Michael Stephen Fuchs
DON'T SHOOT ME IN THE ASS, AND OTHER STORIES by Michael Stephen Fuchs
D-BOYS by Michael Stephen Fuchs
COUNTER-ASSAULT by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book One - Fortress Britain, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Two - Mogadishu of the Dead, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN : Genesis, by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN Book Three - Three Parts Dead, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN Book Four - Maximum Violence, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN Book Five - EXODUS, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN Book Six - The Horizon, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Seven - Death of Empires, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN : NEMESIS by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Nine - Cataclysm by Michael Stephen Fuchs

ARISEN, Book Ten - The Flood by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Thirteen - The Siege by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Fourteen - Endgame by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN : Fickisms
ARISEN : Odyssey
ARISEN : Last Stand
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 1 - The Collapse
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 2 - Tribes
Black Squadron
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 3 - Dead Men Walking
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 4 - Duty
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 5 - The Last Raid
ARISEN : Fickisms ][ – This Time, It's Personal
ARISEN : Operators, Volume I - The Fall of the Third Temple
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