Hi!

As this goes out, we should have wrapped up the Panoplia Iberica, Mexico edition! And with any luck I’m swanning about Mexico city with a few days to see the place before we head off to Queretaro. If you’re on SwordPeople (and it would be great if you were!) you’ll have seen photos already. It’s a better venue for sharing as-it-happens stuff than an email list. I’m actually writing this last Tuesday, because I doubt I’ll have much time for typing while I’m away.

This newsletter is going out on a Monday (shock, horror!) because we’re all recovering from the launch of the dagger course. This seems to have gone well, but oh my it was riddled with problems behind the scenes- not least, for technical reasons we had to delay the launch by a week, which meant that it ended while I was away from my desk somewhere in Central America, and also ended on a Friday, so clashed with the regular newsletter slot. If you’re wondering why on earth launching a course requires so many emails, I have a blog post for you: Why am I getting so many damn emails?​

And of course, that “few hours left” email that slipped out when I was scheduling the launch emails. Buttock-clenchingly embarrassing. Here’s what happened:
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You need to click the right end with the pencil to schedule it. I clicked the wrong end of that bar. There’s no confirmation stage. So out it went. Oof. Sorry again.

I’m also working through my blog- there’s a dozen years’ worth of articles and essays, some of which are still (I think) really useful. Blogs are kind of dead, or at least that’s what the cool kids on the internet seem to think, in that it’s really hard to get attention with them any more. But mine is still a body of work that people may find useful, it just needs a tidy. Here’s a not-so-old one on the parallels between revolutions in woodwork, horology, and AI: https://guywindsor.net/2023/03/craft-woodworking-watches-and-ai/​

And a very old one on how to enter into measure without dicking about: https://guywindsor.net/2012/05/entering-the-fray/​

This was probably the birth of my “Who Moves First” multiplier, which you may be familiar with from any one of my training manuals.

Cool stuff from the internet

Joanna Penn interviewed me on her very popular indy author podcast The Creative Penn. You can find it here:

This week on the podcast: Drawing A Dream of Swords with Chris Schweizer

Chris Schweizer is a three-time Eisner Award nominated cartoonist, a writer, concept artist and illustrator who lives in rural Kentucky with his wife, daughter, two cats and a long legged dog. He also supplied me with a gigantic list of his previous jobs, but now he makes comics.

In our conversation we hear about how Chris got into being a comic artist, why he doesn’t get to do much HEMA, how he used to fight in bars for money, and a Monty Python connection.

Over the past year, Chris has been going around museums drawing pictures of swords. He has put these together into a book, A Dream of Swords, which has an introduction by friend of the podcast, Sebastian de Castell. You can support Chris’s kickstarter, which runs until 10th October 2024: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/schweizer/a-dream-of-swords.

The book is a collection of 100 monotone watercoloured drawings of swords from museums in Paris, London, and New York. There will also be original artworks, prints, and digital versions available. Check it out!

What I’m reading

Oh my, there have been a lot of disappointments in my reading lately. Obviously, I don’t want to share the details of bad books, because I don’t want to put them in your heads. So, I’ve gone back and re-read some useful and some fun works. The Four Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss, is a classic, and it’s worth revisiting for the principles. A lot of the specific tactics don’t work any more, but it was reading this book that inspired me to go to Italy for three months in 2015, rather than renting a flat in Helsinki while ours was being worked on.

And Lois McMaster Bujold is always worth a revisit (though I didn’t get on so well with her Sharing Knife series). I’ve recently re-read a couple of her short stories/novellas. “Winterfair Gifts” is a delight, and “Flowers of Vashnoi” a bit less delightful, quite disturbing when you think about it, but a really good addendum to the Vorkosigan saga.

cheers,

Guy