Hi,

Over the last couple of weeks I have been diving into the “organise The Sword Guy material” project. It really needs a better working title. I’m leaning towards “Lessons from The Sword Guy”, what do you think?

It is turning into a much harder project than I anticipated. It turns out 2.4 million words is a bit much for most search functions to actually search reliably! I had to learn how to generate a markup file of all 200 or so transcripts. And even then, given that most people don’t talk in reliable search terms, it can be quite tricky to find the relevant bits from the relevant interviews. The goal is to turn five years of conversations with historians, swordsmiths, martial artists and authors into practical guides on topics like improving freeplay, learning faster, or writing better fight scenes.

It would help to make a firm decision on exactly which topic to produce for the first issue, and exactly what format each issue will take. It’s not really in my nature to think a project through in detail, then act on it. I tend to just figure out the first step, do that, and then work from there. So designing a format or template for all (probably) 30 issues that will work for all topics is really difficult.

What would you like to see?