Consulting Swordsman
In this week’s intermediate level class, our monthly freeplay diagnostic session, the theme was One Thing. We began with the cutting drill, and I gave them one round of it to identify one general movement issue to work on. Then about one minute of basic power drills to identify one technical or tactical weakness to … Read more
One of the major drivers of syllabus development is the difficulties the senior students have either with the drills themselves, or with making sense of them. Recently the stretto form of second drill has been causing problems. Most critically this comes from the (perfectly reasonable) perception that step four of the drill is the counter … Read more
This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of this beginner’s course. Unusually for me I actually wrote out a class plan in advance. I wondered whether given what we had covered before, we could get through the first seven plays of the first … Read more
This week’s intermediate class yielded some interesting insights. I began by asking my students what they thought my job was. As far as I see it, at their level, my job is mainly to keep their practice mindful, and provide solutions to any problem that crops up that they cannot solve themselves. We started by … Read more
I should warn you, reading this, that my experiments in the land of data entry have shifted to a new phase. I am boldly going into Star Trek territory, and dictating this to the computer. This experiment has yielded some astonishingly weird results, including one mini shit-storm on Facebook, but it is very interesting (to … Read more
The distribution mechanisms of print on demand and ebook titles are arcane in the extreme. But it appears that the paperback versions of Veni Vadi Vici and the 2nd edition of the Swordsman’s Companion will have filtered through by the middle of May. And while the pdfs can be had from my Scribd account, the … Read more
I have just come back from teaching seminar in Oulu, a charming little town in the North of Finland. Friday afternoon was spent doing game development with our game designer for the new card game, which is coming on very nicely. I was asked to run a conditioning class before the intermediate class that evening, … Read more
I’ve been rushed off my feet with a plethora of interesting projects, including a card game version of Fiore’s art of arms, an upcoming trip to Oulu, and finding out the hard way that my youngest child is lactose intolerant, so time for blogging has been severely curtailed. I hope that the next few weeks … Read more
I have spent the morning fiddling about with web interfaces to get my Veni Vadi Vici and Swordsman’s Companion books distributed. Expect both to be generally available as epubs and paperbacks very soon, and for those that can’t wait a moment longer, I have uploaded them to my scribd account as pdfs for paid download. … Read more
Week 4 and we are half way through the course. We ran through a normal warm-up, including kicking squats, knuckle push-ups and falling. Then I had them remember as much as they could of the four guards drill, with minimal demonstration. A few of the attendees had missed last week’s class, and this really highlighted … Read more