Hi!

Happy New Year! I personally think that moving the change of the year from after the Spring Equinox to after the Winter Solstice was a mistake, but no amount of my complaining will change that. Word to the wise though: if you’re in the northern hemisphere it’ll be much easier to make and stick to resolutions in April than it will be now. So take it easy. I have a couple of things that may help: the Swordschool Training Year Planner, and a discount on my online courses.

The Swordschool Training Year Planner

Plan your training like a pro!

With this beautiful full-colour planner you can set goals, plan your training, and review your progress.

Aspire to mastery of the Art of Arms, and craft a lifestyle that will lead you towards it. From daily training goals to annual events, this planner works from the specific details of daily life to the overall theme of your year. Connect with like-minded enthusiasts on swordpeople.com and share your progress with the tag #planner.

Design your days, map out the year, create monthly themes, and reflect with quarterly reviews.

It’s available in paperback, print-at-home PDF, and wirebound.

50% off your first month of Mastering the Art of Arms

While you’re planning your training in 2025, you may find some online courses useful, so I have a 50% discount on the Mastering the Art of Arms subscription, which gives you access to all of my online courses. You can use the code 2025STARTRIGHT at checkout to get half off the first month, or use this link. This code is valid until the end of January. You’ll find the Solo Training course, How to Teach, the Medieval Wrestling, Dagger, and Longsword courses, the Complete Rapier course, and a ton of other stuff too. Something for everyone! Well, everyone likely to be on this list, anyway. The subscription will renew at the end of your first month at the full price, but you can cancel at any time (I don’t take it personally).

2024 Review and plans for 2025

2024 was a monster year in many respects. I travelled a ton, I published six (six!) books, and generally the things I have a measure of control over went pretty well.

I’ve published a blog post on the year that’s gone, and my plans for 2025, which has been up on Sword People for a couple of weeks in the Salle space, and went up on my blog a few days ago. It includes a summary of the travelling and publishing, and some goals for 2025. You can read it here:

What I’m reading

In my last email I mentioned Sebastien de Castell’s Play of Shadows (the first volume in a new series, set in his Greatcoats milieu), and, 80 pages in, I said “Lots of swashbuckling, an antihero who turns out to have hidden depths, sexy assassins and beastly villains, the lot. Great fun. 100% recommended holiday reading!”

I massively undersold it. It’s brilliant. I’m a big fan of his work anyway, and this is probably (I think) his best book. Do yourself a favour and read it. I ended up losing sleep staying up for “just one more chapter”, and bunked off work to read more of it too. You have been warned.

When I finished Play of Shadows I started on The Evening and the Morning, one of Ken Follett’s epic historical novels, this one set around the year 1000, in England, and tells the story of how his fictional town Kingsbridge came into being. It’s pretty well researched, and generally a surprisingly accurate portrayal of life back then (not that it’s my own area of expertise, so I may have missed stuff). The writing is plain, but the story is gripping, the characters his usual mix of genius-but-poor builder-type, clever and under-appreciated woman, dastardly bishops, and so on. I really like his stuff, though it’s more breadth and pace than depth and detail.

Then I picked up The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Holy cow, I had no idea how my views of how life was in prehistory were actually an unexamined and internally inconsistent hodgepodge of Rousseau’s noble savage and Hobbes’s nasty brutish and short. I’m about 100 pages in, and it’s superb, really eye-opening. If you have any interest in anthropology, archaeology, prehistory, the interaction of European thought (or lack of it) with Native American and other ideas, and the origins of our notions of social equality and inequality, read it. I don’t yet know how much of it I agree with, or how much it may change my view of history, but so far I keep having to fetch bits of my mind from the walls and ceilings onto which they’ve been blown. It’s awesome.

cheers,

Guy