A while back, I wrote about applying the Theory of Constraints to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. The central idea was that a BJJ match is a dynamic constraint system: both players continuously add and release constraints on each other, shifting the bottleneck back and forth with every grip, every weight transfer, every failed sweep.
The framework was satisfying but incomplete.
As an engineer, I’m drawn to systems: constraints, flows, feedback loops. As a manager, I’ve learned that the most interesting part is rarely the system itself : it’s what happens to the people inside it. How they adapt, resist, break, or grow. The system shapes them as much as they reshape the system.
BJJ is one of the clearest places I’ve seen that dynamic play out. The mat is a system you can describe with precision. What it does to the people on it is something else entirely and I’d never seen anyone write about that.
So I wrote a novel.
What the book is about
Ceinture Blanche (White Belt) follows multiple characters through a full season at a BJJ club in France.
None of them are experts. Most of them are lost. All of them are changed, one way or another, by the time the season ends.
The book is an ensemble novel, what the French call a roman choral: no single protagonist, just a community of voices, each with their own reasons for being on the mat and their own way of making sense of what happens there.
I’d started several ensemble novels over the years and abandoned all of them. This one made it to the end.
The technical side is genuine, if you train BJJ, you’ll recognize everything. If you don’t, you won’t need to: the technique is always in service of the people learning it.
Why it’s in French
I write this blog in English, my second language. The novel is in French, my first.
It’s the only way it could have worked. Fiction lives in the gap between what you mean and what you say. In a second language, that gap is too wide. The emotion gets lost in translation before it even reaches the page.
Also: there are almost no novels about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. The sport has a rich ecosystem of instructional content, podcasts, competition footage, but almost nothing in literary fiction, and next to nothing in French. That gap felt worth filling.
Who it’s for
If you remember your first season on the mat: the confusion, the humiliation, the strange satisfaction of a technique that finally clicks, I think you’ll find something familiar in it.
If you’ve never trained but you’re curious about what draws people to a sport where you spend most of your time being controlled by strangers, this might answer that question.
Where to get it
Ceinture Blanche is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
And don’t forget: tap early, tap often.