Hi!

First up, thanks to everyone who went and bought the new book, From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: the Wrestling Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi. It’s a niche within a niche within a niche, so I wasn’t sure it would recover its layout and design costs, but it’s now firmly in the black. Phew! The next big project in that direction will be the dagger section of the Getty manuscript. I’ll be flying back to Kansas to get stabbed many times by Jessica Finley, as we record my interpretation of every one of the 70-odd dagger plays. This will result in both a new Medieval Dagger course, and the next instalment of From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice, which will probably be catchily subtitled “The Dagger Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi”. See what I’m doing there?

You may wonder why the longsword section got the full treatment and was published in 2020, then you had to wait four years for the next volume, which perhaps ought to have been the first volume, as it covers the beginning of the manuscript. Well, here’s the thing. Writing these books is really hard, and I’m most interested in the longsword section and I already had all the video I needed (from the Complete Medieval Longsword Course), so I got that volume in 2019, and it was laid out and made publishable in early 2020. I saw no sense in holding it back to make the publication schedule fit the order of the manuscript, and I also felt that the momentum on the project would carry through to help me get the rest of it done.

I didn’t have all the video I needed to do the wrestling, dagger, armoured combat on foot, or mounted combat sections, so they had to wait. Something stopped me from travelling about the place much in 2020 and 2021 (can’t think what that might have been), so the project lost momentum, until I could pick it up again last year.

The current plan is to get the dagger and armoured combat footage shot this year, and we should probably have the dagger book out by the end of the year, and maybe even have the whole series done by the end of 2025. I’m thinking a snazzy box set…

Don’t quote me on that though, because anything can happen in the meantime. The wrestling book would have been out in October last year, but in between drafts of the manuscript, I wrote the first draft of a whole other book (From Your Head to Their Hands: how to write, publish, and market training manuals for historical martial artists). That slowed things down a bit, but I got it off my plate and into the world in February. The audiobook will be out next month.

And, I’m planning to get a book on how to teach out in maybe May or June. Maybe. It’s basically written, but I’m not quite in the right mental place to finish it off at the moment. It’s called Get Them Moving: how to teach historical martial arts.

Last night I watched The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with daughter #2, and wished they’d made all seven Narnia books into movies, because as adaptations go, it’s excellent. This may seem off-topic but it’s not: it reminded me that the publication order of the Narnia books does not reflect the internal chronology. The publication order is:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Prince Caspian

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The Silver Chair

The Horse and His Boy

The Magician's Nephew

The Last Battle

But the internal chronology starts with The Magician’s Nephew; then The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy (my favourite of the books) occurs during the same period as The Lion, and then the rest are in order.

It’s a mistake to let the perfect, or the strictly rational, get in the way of the good or the effective. My writing and publishing “method” appears from the outside to be haphazard and disorganised. And it is. I honestly don’t know until a week or two beforehand when a book will be ready to publish… but I still somehow manage to average more than a book a year over the last 12 years (since I began self-publishing). And more than one full-size course a year, since I began making courses 7 years ago. It reminds me a bit of Drunken Monkey Kung Fu. if you’ve ever sparred with someone using that style, you’ll know what I mean. Chaos and weirdness, then BAM! a fist out of nowhere and you’re flat on your back wondering how a wall fell on you.

The one main downside is it makes effective marketing much harder. I really should spread launches out more evenly, so as not to deluge you with multiple launches close together. Such as, this weekend marks the 23rd anniversary of my School, which began officially on March 17th 2001. To celebrate this, here’s a 23% discount on all digital products (ebooks, courses, and audiobooks) at the Swordschool Shop, and all courses on the Teachable platform:

SWORDSCHOOL23

Just paste that code into the discounts box at checkout.

The discount code will expire on the 22nd, but I won’t be bugging you with reminder emails (you had to put up with at lot of that last week).

The code doesn’t apply to physical books because of the printing and shipping costs.

Thanks again for your support of my work!

This week on The Sword Guy: Writing Historical Novels: the Facts and the Fiction, with Elizabeth Chadwick

Elizabeth Chadwick is an award winning best-selling writer of historical fiction. She has been writing since she was a teenager, but it took many years and many books before she was finally published. She has had great success since, so it’s a good example for aspiring writers out there to keep going!

In our conversation we talk about some of the historical figures which feature in Elizabeth’s novels, including William Marshal, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Joan of Kent. Have a listen to find out what fascinating lives these people led, and also how Elizabeth separates the myths from the facts in the delicate balancing act that is writing a good historical novel about people who actually existed.

You can find the episode here:

yours,

Guy

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