Instructors: Rory Miller and Steve Perry. This is a how-to for writers who want to use martial arts in their stories. Rory Miller and I come from different backgrounds, and our takes on the subject don't always match, but between the two of us, we have been down a few roads that might offer directions to writers who know little about the notion of fisticuffs in fiction, or how best to stab somebody with assorted blades, or shoot them to good dramatic effect.

We'll talk a bit about history, about the differences between movie-fu and real fights, and how to write a fight scene that moves and entertains. Questions are, of course, welcome, and if we don't know the answer, probably we can find it. 

Rory Miller is a seventeen-year veteran of a metropolitan correctional system.  He spent seventeen years, including ten as a sergeant, with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland Oregon.  His assignments included Booking, Maximum Security, Disciplinary and Administrative Segregation, and Mental Health Units.  He was a CERT (Corrections Emergency Response Team) member for over eleven years and Team Leader for six.

His training has included over eight hundred hours of tactical training; witness protection and close-quarters handgun training with the local US Marshals; Incident Command System; Instructor Development Courses; AELE Discipline and Internal Investigations; Hostage Negotiations and Hostage Survival; Integrated Use of Force and Confrontational Simulation Instructor; Mental Health; Defensive Tactics, including the GRAPLE instructors program; Diversity; and Supervision.

Rory has designed and taught courses including Confrontational Simulations; Uncontrolled Environments; Crisis Communications with the Mentally Ill; CERT Operations and Planning; Defensive Tactics; and Use of Force for Multnomah County and other local agencies.

In 2008 Rory Miller left his agency to spend over a year in Iraq with the Department of Justice ICITAP program as a civilian advisor to the Iraqi Corrections System.

He has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, a blackbelt in jujutsu and college varsities in judo and fencing.  He also likes long walks on the beach.

His writings have been featured in Loren Christensen’s “Fighter’s Fact Book 2: The Street”  Kane and Wilder’s “Little Black Book of Violence” and “The Way to Blackbelt.”  Rory is the author of “Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence” published by YMAA