Hi!

I have to confess my mojo has been at a pretty low ebb for the last couple of months. There’s no obvious reason why, but I haven’t written a word in any of my current book projects, and while I did manage to edit and publish the new Vadi course, that was about it for creative juices flowing.

I’m inclined to associate this with the very annoying cholesterol results I got back from a routine health check at the end of March, which lead me to drop alcohol altogether for a month. Clearly my habit of drinking a couple of glasses of wine while cooking dinner, and another couple with dinner, most nights of the week, for years, was channelling too much Fiore (he was Italian, after all) for my English constitution to tolerate. Just a few weeks off had the even more annoying result of significantly improving my cholesterol levels. So other than one birthday party at the beginning of May, where I found out that my ability to metabolise ethanol was utterly ruined by a month’s abstinence, and one afternoon where I split a bottle of Chardonnay with a friend, I’ve not been drinking at all.

According to my tracking devices (an Oura ring, and a Garmin smart watch, both of which I use when running tests but not in normal life), my sleep was improved (with average heart rate at 50 or lower all night, and lowest at 43-45, for 7.5 hours of actual sleep). And so I should be full of beans and leaping about the place. But my knees hurt, my back hurts, and I haven’t had the tiniest scrap of creative vision.

So on Monday night I had a glass of wine with dinner. According to the devices, that did lead to worse sleep. But the next day I was burbling about brimming with creative vigour, and have cracked the biggest issue I am currently facing professionally (more about that later).

Not only that, but I have finally, finally, edited and published the long awaited improved Section 5 of The Medieval Longsword course. This had terrible trouble with the sound (caused by a microphone failure). So when Jo York came down to finish the Vadi material (which I mentioned in the last newsletter), we re-shot that entire section, and I’ve edited it and published it on Teachable and SwordPeople. Anyone who has bought the course (alone or in a bundle), or is subscribed to the Mastering the Art of Arms subscription, should see it there in their course materials.

Hurrah! Sorry it took so long.

Plus, my back is better and my knees are fine too (I think the issue was tight hamstrings, so slackening them off has helped a lot. That was probably nothing to do with wine one way or the other). But I seem to have my flow back, so will stay off the wine for a bit longer (until I hit my cholesterol goal of LDL below 3.0).

So what of the big issue I mentioned? Simply this. There’s too much content in my ecosystem. Too many books and courses for most people to really engage with. Where the hell should anyone start? It confuses me, and I produced the damn stuff. And I’m still producing more…

I don’t want to delete anything (ok, Veni Vadi Vici is gone, replaced by The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest), and it’s all useful to the right person. The Quick Start guides have been helpful, I think, but they are now very out of date, and the flowchart format is really hard to update sensibly.

So, I am going to create a new course, Introduction to Historical Martial Arts, which takes beginners through enough mechanics, callisthenics, footwork, sword handling, history and theory, and the basics of Fiore’s Art of Arms (on foot out of armour), Vadi, Capoferro, I.33, and some Liechtenauer and Von Baumann, and even some Bolognese (because why not?). This means interleaving sections and lessons from the various courses I already have, with excerpts from the various books, so that a beginner can get a good idea of the theory and practice of historical martial arts, and make an informed decision about where to focus their training, without being overwhelmed by too much stuff all at once.

Someone may come for the history and be seduced by the mechanics. Or think they love longsword the best, to be wowed by the rapier. Or indeed may actually know already what they are most interested in, and skip all the material that’s irrelevant to them, but get the bits they need from (for example) the mechanics course and the solo training course, to make their dive into their weapon or master of choice more accessible and productive.

This is a big scary beast of a project, but it should produce something that is fundamentally useful to the HMA community.

What do you think?

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Visiting Belgrade for Sword and Balkan 2025

I'm delighted to let you know I'll be teaching at the Sword and Balkan event, June 14-15th. It's going to be my first time in Serbia, and the event looks like great fun. I'd love to see you there. I'll be teaching classes on Longsword and Rapier, and giving a lecture on Syllabus Design. Sound like fun?

You can find the event details, registration etc. here.

The Scoliotic Knight

Toby Capwell’s lecture on Richard III, The Scoliotic Knight, went live last week. Toby is a very nice man, and is offering a 40% discount on the (I think already very reasonable) £25 price. You can find the lecture here. Use the code RICHARDIIIFOREVER at checkout to get the discount.

The code will expire at the end of May.

We are putting the finishing touches on his next lecture too, so stay tuned!

What I’m Reading

One symptom of my mojo-less state was picking easy reads. I picked up Lois McMaster Bujold’s Diplomatic Immunity for about the 8th time, and loved it all over again. Digging through other books I’ve read more than once I came across M.R. Carey’s awesome Book of Koli trilogy. Carey does post-apocalypse better than anyone else, so I went online and found his The Girl with All the Gifts. Generally I don’t touch any book starting with “The Girl…”, because they are usually crap. I also have no interest in zombies of any kind. But I tried this on the strength of Koli, and oh my goddess it’s excellent. Yes, zombies, kind of. But the apocalypse is created by something I’ve actually thought about (no spoilers here though), and it goes off in an unexpected direction. The first few chapters read like teen-lit, but do not be fooled, this is adults-only. It’s gruesome and horrific and the zombies aren’t the worst of it. But really, really well done.

I followed that up with its prequel, The Boy on the Bridge, which is also brilliant.

On the return of my mojo (was it the wine?) I started Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone. I heard him on a podcast a while back and ordered the paperback to see what all the fuss was about. It was too heavy for me to get into when it arrived, but I’m now 160 pages in and let me say the fuss is entirely warranted. Superb writing, superb characters, superb sense of place.

cheers,

Guy