Funny. I'll tell you I am not at all a sports fan. But I've come to appreciate the vast and deep ocean of sports metaphors sloshing around in the English language - no matter which side of the pond you're on. I think I even put one in the first book - something about feeling like a puck in a hockey game, only my hockey game was played in three dimensions in low or no gravity. You're probably never going to see a game inside the series. Mostly because war, but I'm not above borrowing a few drops from the metaphor ocean.
Actually putting team sports into a story is right out of the question for me, though. The last team sport I actually enjoyed was kick ball with all of the neighbor kids. Organized sports in school? Complete 180. Aversion therapy to the extreme. So yeah. Not likely. Unless I'm also trying to torture a character. But individual sports? You may be able to guess from Enemy Within that I fenced for a few years and enjoyed the heck out of it. Had all the gear and several blades - at least until we went to move aboard the boat. Sigh. It's not something I can do now with a bum hip, alas. So I have to get my jollies writing it into fiction. I made Ari and her hero into fencers - though with energy blades and the whole thing is supposed to be more like staged combat in that you don't fence a line. So long as you stay in the grid, you can fight in the round. Not that it matters - it was only useful in the story as a means of breaking through Ari's conditioning.
Funny, too, I would have told you I hadn't invented any kind of martial art system, but I guess I did. Jayleia, the heroine from Enemy Games, has a particular set of martial training that marries gymnastics and kicking the crap out of someone who never sees you coming. While I don't codify the moves in the story much, the point of the system is to keep Jay out of range of whoever she engages - dance in, strike, GTFO, dance back in for another strike, rinse, repeat. It was something she had as a secret from her past - something that she had to reclaim. Again, it was useful as a plot device to force a character to change.
Games? Funny. You'd think I'd have all kinds of games in my books. We spend so much time as a family unit in games - whether MMORPGs, board games, or having friends over for Munchkin or Exploding Kittens. Or going to the local Sunday night D&D league at the game store. But so far, while you know there are games - mostly gambling type games - on Silver City, say, you don't see them much. How interesting that my characters spend most of their time fighting their separate bad guys rather than having actual lives or down time. Now I'm thinking that maybe I'm going to see about building a game of some kind into book 4 of this series. Cause that book might just be a tiny bit intense and it might need something to pave the way between the hero and heroine. Hmmm. Help me out here. I'm going to want something deceptively simple but that's layers and layers of deep. Maybe a puzzle of some kind that doesn't get solved until the very end of the book and means the arcs have been achieved.
Thanks a lot, you guys, I wasn't ready to start plotting that book yet.
