Episode 210: From Homeschool to Author, with Amos Wilson
Share
PODBEAN - APPLE - SPOTIFY
Amos Christian Wilson is an independent Christian author, poet and musician. He is also a home school graduate and third born of 12 who loves reading, the outdoors, theology and history. He went from high school to a wide range of trade jobs, from carpentry to piano tuning to horse shoeing. He seeks to write books which centre around religious characters and immersive world building.
In our conversation we talk about growing up as one of 12 and being homeschooled, and how a picture book about arms and armour sparked Amos’s love of swords, followed by a Fiore manual from a homeschool organisation’s catalogue of “toys for growing men”.
We talk about some of the different jobs Amos has done over the years to support his true career as a writer. He describes his four-book Gwambi series as Treasure Island meets Chronicles of Narnia, with maybe a little bit of Charles Dickens thrown in there. You can find Amos on Substack and download a free ebook there. Or find out more on his website, https://www.acwilson.net.
As Amos isn’t a historical martial artist, he has a different idea of what he would do with $1 million, and it’s one that Guy is fascinated by.
Transcript
Guy Windsor
Amos Christian Wilson is an independent Christian author, poet and musician. He is also a home school graduate and third born of 12 who loves reading, the outdoors, theology and history. For better or for worse, A.C. Wilson went from high school to a wide range of trade jobs, from carpentry to piano tuning to horse shoeing. He seeks to write books which centre around religious characters and immersive world building. Currently, he lives with his wife and children in the scenic Flint Hills of Kansas, close to where we actually met about a year ago. So without further ado, Amos, welcome to the show.
Amos Wilson
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Guy Windsor
It's nice to see you almost in person again. Just to orient everybody, I know where Kansas is, and I have an idea where the Flint Hills are. But are you in Flint Hills right now?
Amos Wilson
I am, yes. Kansas obviously, is smack dab in the middle of the US. And it has a reputation for being just a super flat pancake of a state with nothing but prairie for as far as the eye can see, which is true for about 80% of Kansas. But on the east side of Kansas, it's actually where the great ice sheets during the Ice Age ended right there in the middle of Kansas. And it pushed up these hills, these gorgeous Flint Hills, on the east side of Kansas, and that is where I live.
Guy Windsor
Lovely. So the only bit of Kansas that isn't flat?
Amos Wilson
Well, I mean, yes, pretty much, pretty much. There are some other parts of Kansas that aren't totally flat, but, the problem is, the way to make a Kansan upset is to tell them that Kansas is flat.
Guy Windsor
Okay, I will bear that in mind for future reference. I may need that one day.
Amos Wilson
Yeah, because we tend to get upset at people like, oh, Kansas is flat. Like, have you seen Indiana? Okay, you're calling Kansas flat. So, yeah.
Guy Windsor
To be fair, most people haven't seen Kansas or Indiana. So fair enough.
Amos Wilson
That's true. That's true.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so, I mean, the reason we met last year is because you're on my mailing list, and I sent out a message saying I was going to be in Lawrence, and why don't we all go to the pub? So clearly, you're into historical martial arts. So, how did that come about?
Amos Wilson
So growing up, we had this, like picture book called Arms and Armor that just had all kinds of different swords, flintlocks, starting from like Clovis technology, from like the Stone Age, up through modern stuff. And I loved just pouring over that book, and that began a session with any books, especially books with lots of pictures with swords in them. So I'm like, six years old going to the library, any picture book that's got a sword, I'm picking it up and found one book in particular, and it's obviously so particular because I can remember, it's called swords by Ben Boos, and it's just got gorgeous illustrations of swords. But unlike all of the other picture books I had discovered with swords. So I'm probably 10 at this point. It had footnotes. And I was discovering footnotes for the first time. I was like, that's cool. And I had this lineup of medieval swords with different handle types, and it's like, Oakeshott-type, whatever. And I was like, what's an Oakeshott-type? And so I did a look on our library and discovered Ewart Oakeshott, and that we had one of his books at our library in Manhattan, Kansas. And so it's the Dark Age Warrior, which is his book that looks at migration age warriors. I don't know if it's still called the migration era, but that was what he called it. I was a late reader. So I went from basically looking at picture books of swords at 10 to reading Ewart Oakeshott’s book on the Dark Age warrior. And I have never looked back.
Guy Windsor
I mean that. So just remind me, what was the book? Ben Boos. How do you spell Boos?
Amos Wilson
Boos.
Guy Windsor
It's a book I've never heard of. I shall have to look it up.
Amos Wilson
It's a kid's book, and it's got almost no words in the book. It clearly was entirely just pictures of swords. It clearly worked. And I think what that book did that was fascinating is it had a lot of illustrations of, like, archeological finds. So, he has a one on Bronze Age and La Tène culture swords. I think that's how you pronounce it. Is it La Tène, like the Celtic swords? So he had drawings that he had done of swords they had pulled out of the ground. And I had never thought of the fact like, oh, wait, you can excavate swords. You can pull these ancient swords out of the ground, and they're there. It was a brain expanding book.
Guy Windsor
Have you seen the Oakeshott Institute?
Amos Wilson
I haven’t.
Guy Windsor
Given that Ewart Oakeshott is your sword godfather in this respect
Amos Wilson
My gateway drug.
Guy Windsor
No, I think the Boos book is maybe the marijuana and Oakeshott is maybe moving on to slightly heavier stuff. Yeah, it's in Minneapolis. I actually was there last year and they have actual, like, Bronze Age swords from 3000 BC, and you can pick them up and play with them.
Amos Wilson
I think it was on your podcast where I first learned that Ewart Oakeshott had an institute where you could pick up swords. And I was like, are you joking? This random dude that I never heard of before, and I just found a random book by, he's got swords in Minneapolis.
Guy Windsor
Well, what happened was, he was a massive collector, right? One of the founders of the Arms and Armour Society in the UK. And, you know, Britain has an awful lot of old swords knocking about in various institutions or whatever. And he was collecting back when swords were cheap. So he had a huge collection. And when he died, there wasn't an institution in Britain that could take it. And so the Arms and Armor company that makes swords, run by Chris Poor and Craig Johnson, because they were friends with Ewart, they took on his collection, right, and they keep it. And part of his thing was people will not understand swords if they can't hold them. And so, one of the kind of founding ethos is of the of the Institute, is that you can go there and you can actually pick up the swords and play with them. You can't whack them together, or you whack them into people or whack them into targets or anything like that. You have to handle them respectfully and carefully and not damage them, but you can literally pick them up and hold them and move them around.
Amos Wilson
I really need to do this.
Guy Windsor
It’s fabulous. There's actually on the Oakeshott Institute's YouTube channel, there's a video of when I was there. They did an interview with me, and I'm there sort of playing with some of the swords. And they got out tons and tons of swords me to play with beforehand. So I'd already been there for like two hours, just like, oh, playing with this rapier, playing with this small sword. And they have like, a 15th century long sword there with its original handle, and I got to pick it up and play with it. It's like, Oh, my God, right. That is not the gateway drug that is the crack cocaine, that is the crystal meth of swords. And it’s not that far away. You could drive there in a day.
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's not that far away.
Guy Windsor
By American standards, that's next door, and they're very nice people.
Amos Wilson
I also have friends in the Minneapolis area, so it would be very easy to get there.
Guy Windsor
They are very lovely people and because you're someone with a serious interest, they will be happy to see you. If you happen to meet Chris, get him talking about Ewart Oakeshott, and then you'll get an idea of the man himself, because Chris knew Ewart quite well. Okay, now you find Ewart Oakeshott. So how did you get from swords in books to swords in hand?
Amos Wilson
So that was my obsession with swords themselves, but I did not know that HEMA was a thing until much later, at risk of going into too much of backstory, I was homeschooled, and there's lots of different homeschool organisations. One of them was called Vision Forum. It is now defunct, but they used to every year send out these magazines that had like curriculum for homeschooling, but then they also had like, toys and whatnot. And so it was a highlight of the year. We'd get the vision for a magazine, and we would like sort through it and among their toys for growing men section of the catalogue.
Guy Windsor
That tells us an awful lot about their attitude.
Amos Wilson
Yes, yes, it does. In the toys for drawing men section, one of their pages, they were selling these, like black plastic swords, like polyurethane or something that were designed for sparring with actual practice. And then they had a book. And I should have done my research to remember who the author of this book was. There was a HEMA book that it was a Fiore. It was so it was a manual trying to explain how to do medieval longsword, specifically from Fiore, with pictures demoing different moves and what it would have been probably like 2000
Guy Windsor
What year was this?
Amos Wilson
It would have been… probably 2000ish?
Guy Windsor
Because the only book I can think of that was out there was mine, but there's no way that was on the homeschool circuit.
Amos Wilson
And that's the thing is, my recollection is the guy kind of looked like you, but I don't know, I feel like I looked it up recently. I will get back to you.
Guy Windsor
Okay, don't worry, we'll stick that in the show notes later. But I'm fascinated that there's a book about Fiore that made it onto a homeschool curriculum. That is cool. Okay, so this book arrives, presumably you read it.
Amos Wilson
So my brother ends up getting that book as a Christmas gift that year, and then we buy ourselves these black polyurethane practice swords. And we are, I'm probably 16 at the time, and unfortunately, we did no more than just kind of flip through this book. We didn't actually read the book or actually learn any of the moves. We just got right to whacking each other with these swords in the backyard.
Guy Windsor
You are not alone. Honestly, that describes the majority of historical martial arts practitioners I've come across.
Amos Wilson
And even at the time, I did not know that this book, like, I was just like, Oh, that's cool. There's like, a manuscript from the medieval period that has sword fighting. That's neat. And I did not know there was a culture around it, until let's see. So this would have been, what was it, Agincourt? The 600th anniversary? So 2015. We decided in Kansas, I didn't really know much about Agincourt, except that I loved the Henry V movie by Kenneth Branagh, and so I was like, let's do an Agincourt 600 extravaganza. And so we rented this little farmhouse, and I put together this little lecture on the history of Agincourt and what was going on. I would probably cringe at it a lot right now, but it was mostly for, like, middle schoolers in homeschool. And then we were going to finish off the night watching the Kenneth Branagh movie. And then a friend of a friend, was like, hey, you should talk to this guy, because he makes armour. And I was like, that's interesting. So I, like, contacted him and was like, hey, I hear you make armour. Can you like, give us a live demonstration of armour? And he is like, yeah, I do HEMA. And I was like, what's HEMA? And he's like, come by my house and we'll talk about it. I was like, cool. And so he had me come by his house, and he put me in some chain mail and a helmet and agreed to come by and give us a live demonstration. And I think he is in Manhattan, and does HEMA, or at least did back in the day. That was my one time I have ever met him, but that was also my moment where I was like, oh, this is big. So I mentioned that sword book that my brother had, and he was like, which manuscript is it? And I was like, I think it's like, this Italian guy that starts with an F. He's like, Fiore. And I was like, yes. He's like, oh yeah, Fiore is great. I was like, I did not know this is a thing. And so he came and for part of that, we cracked out these black plastic swords. And he was like, hey, can I fight with you? And I was like, sure, why not? And I was feeling very cocky, because I had practiced with my teenage brothers. And I was like, yeah, I know how to use this thing. And he had me disarmed within seconds. And I was like, oh, this is much more. I probably should have read that book. So, I have dabbled on the edge. So I have never gone deeper than that. I have always kind of been dabbling on the edges of HEMA. I have another friend who does HEMA in Manhattan, and he's like, you need to come with me. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I have kids, I don't have evenings free very often. So hopefully eventually I will actually fall down the rabbit hole all the way and actually get into historical martial arts.
Guy Windsor
OK, so you're not actually training historical martial arts much yourself.
Amos Wilson
No.
Guy Windsor
No, okay, fair enough. It's a good thing to establish so we can sort of correct everyone's expectations. You are by no means alone on this podcast in not being a practicing sword person. That's fine. You are still amongst friends. Don't worry.
Amos Wilson
I am very intrigued, and I will probably eventually get into HEMA, but so far, I have only been patiently sitting on the sidelines watching people.
Guy Windsor
You know, I have at least one student who trained for a couple of years, then had kids, and then about 18 years later, came back to training, and now she runs her own club. So there is hope.
Amos Wilson
My wife is a third degree black belt in karate, and she used to go to the dojo twice a week, and just hasn't for the last nine years with kids, but the kids are getting old enough, and we have talked. It's like, you know what? We could just become a martial arts family, just like have the kids agreed on a martial art, and I would be voting for HEMA, but I did jiu jitsu.
Guy Windsor
How old are your kids?
Amos Wilson
My oldest is seven. So seven, almost six, four and one.
Guy Windsor
Oh, mine are 18 and has just left for university a few weeks ago, and the other is 16, and will be leaving in two years for university. And it's breaking my heart. I am very jealous of you having really little ones in the house. I would suggest, if you're looking for a martial art that you can all do, Judo is maybe the best starting point, just because it doesn't involve hitting people. It has a very well worked out program for kids, which has been deliberately developed so that kids doing judo from the age of four or five can sort of seamlessly keep training into their adulthood is very well worked out. And a judo background. I don't have any judo in me at all. I've never done a single Judo class, but I have many friends who have and that kind of wrestling background is super useful for a lot of the medieval stuff. So it's laying a really useful groundwork of physical skills that you will find very helpful when you take up medieval longsword stuff. But it doesn't involve all the problems of like sticks going into eyes. You don't really want to train your toddlers to punch people in the face.
Amos Wilson
Really?
Guy Windsor
No, I don't think so. That would actually be my recommendation for that age group, given the spread.
Amos Wilson
I did jujitsu for a year and a half. I feel like those are vaguely similar martial arts.
Guy Windsor
Maybe a little bit.
Amos Wilson
I thought jiu jitsu would be a good one for the kids, because I'm like, yeah, no hitting, just wrestling.
Guy Windsor
Maybe, it kind of depends. But then lots of sort of joint locks and stuff. And it's also having the program worked out for children. And I'm also thinking, if your wife is a third degree black belt in karate, you probably want to do something that is very unlike karate. Otherwise she's just going to smoke all of you.
Amos Wilson
Well, we did that when we were dating. I was doing jiu jitsu at the time, and so she came and sat in on a class, and she had a lot of fun with it, and she's like, oh, can I try and move on you? And again, I was feeling way too cocky, because I had done jujitsu for a year now, and it's like, sure. So she's like, all right, try to punch me. I was like, okay, sure. And next thing I knew, I was flat on my back. And I was like, I didn't even know what you did. And she's like, thank you. That was fun.
Guy Windsor
That's a solid basis for a marriage, actually. Yeah, it's good to realise early on that your wife is always right, and you should just shut up and do what you’re told.
Amos Wilson
But that is so we met doing high school Speech and Debate, so like forensics, and we debated each other once, and she won. So, any time now I'm like, well, I mean, I know who's going to win the argument if we get in to it. We literally had it judged and she won.
Guy Windsor
You've mentioned homeschooling a couple of times. I have no particular experience of it. I've had a student who was homeschooled and he got into Brown University having only been homeschooled, and because they didn't have very much many in the way of like formal teacher people in his life, I ended up writing a recommendation letter for him to help him get into the university. So that's literally the sum total of my involvement in homeschooling. So how does one graduate from homeschooling? Because you have in your I nicked a lot of your bio from your website. A homeschool graduate. So what does that even mean?
Amos Wilson
So I will preface this by saying homeschool, obviously, is a very diverse thing, because it's as different as the families doing it. So there are certain things that are going to be widely different experiences from homeschoolers. There are certain things, though, that are going to be pretty similar between homeschoolers’ experiences. So specifically, what it takes to graduate is actually going to be pretty different depending on whatever homeschooler you talk to, because it's just kind of up to whatever the parents decided to make the reasons they homeschooled or the qualifications for graduating. So for me personally, what that looked like was we didn't really have grades at all, until one day my parents sat me down and. Like, all right, you are now a freshman in high school. And I was like, oh, cool. I have a grade now. And they laid out a four-year plan of everything I would need to finish studying before I graduated. So at that point, I was pretty much self-taught. They would just give me a curriculum, and then I would read through the curriculum. If I had questions, I could come to them. But also I was one of 12, and so you had to schedule that in advance with Mama, sometimes two weeks out before you could actually sit down and talk to her. So we kind of learned to teach ourselves. She would provide the resources, and then we would go to town. She was, much more hands on with the younger kids, and when I was younger, but by the time I got to high school, basically self-taught, with just my parents providing the curriculum. And they had a four year thing of the different science, history, mathematics, whatnot, that I had to complete that year. And then every year they would sit me down and make sure I'd met those goals. Until the final year, the senior year, when they'd be like, yep, you've met all the goals. And so in Kansas, and this differs between the US, home schools are technically private schools that are registered with the state of Kansas, and so they just have to print out a diploma. And that's that. There's other states where you do have to pass a standardised testing for your grade.
Guy Windsor
Because I think a large part of the sort of the external function of high schools and whatnot is to provide a piece of paper that employers recognise. So do you get anything like that?
Amos Wilson
I mean, I have a diploma that is printed out.
Guy Windsor
But it was awarded by your parents.
Amos Wilson
Correct. Honestly, like, I've never had any trouble with employers not recognising it, but also, I'm not like applying to really high level jobs. I'm doing pretty blue collar jobs, and it doesn't really matter.
Guy Windsor
Well, we do have to talk about some of these jobs, because, I mean, homeschooling, piano tuning and farriery are very highly skilled professions. And they're all very differently skilled professions. And looking at those three, the closest together are carpentry and farriery, because they both involve nails. But that's about as good as it gets.
Amos Wilson
Basically, when I graduated high school, I was very much like college is not the place for me. I want to write books, and why do I want to pay all this money for an education? I have mixed feelings about that decision now, but that was the decision I made, and what I ended up doing instead is my last year of high school, and then the next several years afterwards, I was just kind of finding different tradesmen that I knew or I had friends of friends, and asking to either work with them or follow them around, shadow them and just get an idea of the trade. So for farriery, it's a classic example of that. A friend of a friend who is a farrier in this area, and I phone called him, and I was like, hey, I'm really interested in horses, but I know literally nothing about horses. Can I shadow you once a week? And he said yes. And so for about a year and a half, I just went out to his ranch once a week, and whatever he was doing that day, I would tag her along with him. And so I went from knowing literally nothing about horses to half the day I would be managing the horse for him while he worked underneath the horse and trimmed the hooves or shod it. And then the other half the day, he would have me in his corral on a horse, and he would be in his smithy, which he had in his shop, where he's literally smithing stuff, and would be shouting out pointers about what I was doing wrong while I was on the horse's back. And so it was an amazing hands on education, learning about horses. And so, like, I am very familiar with farriery from working with him, but I could never shoe a horse. At the very end of that, I trimmed a horse's hooves once. And it was definitely nothing on the level of any professionally done hoof trimming. He had to trim it all up. So it means that I'm very confident that I could write a farrier as a character, I could never actually shoe a horse. That is farriery.
Guy Windsor
and is the same true of piano tuning?
Amos Wilson
Piano tuning is slightly different, because that one was, I did actually do that. I have charged people to tune pianos before. I shouldn’t say I did it professionally, because I never actually made a profession of it.
Guy Windsor
But you've been paid to do it. You know, you show up, you tune the piano. People are happy with the tuning, and they give you money for it. That indicates a relative level of skill.
Amos Wilson
I never got super deep into it. I think I probably tuned maybe 20 pianos, if that.
Guy Windsor
Why piano tuning?
Amos Wilson
Well, my parents had a piano, and my brother got into piano tuning, and he, he was doing it, he randomly ran into this dude in a nursing home who was a retired piano tuner, and had this whole conversation about the tricks of the trade. And he was like, oh, I could do that. So that's how he got into it. I would watch him, because I thought it was cool. And then one day, he's like, hey, these people need their piano tuned, and I can't do it. Do you want to do it? And I was like, show me the ropes real quick. And that’s how I started doing it. So, yeah, it was very fascinating.
Guy Windsor
This makes me think an awful lot about historical martial arts, and how many people end up teaching historical martial arts professionally, exactly the same way. They see it for a bit, they do it for a bit, then people need it done, and there's no one else around to do it. And so they sort of step up and do it, and then they end up getting paid for it, and it then becomes a thing. This is feeling very familiar.
Amos Wilson
So yeah, I tuned pianos for a while. I like, I don't know if you've ever done anything with instruments at all.
Guy Windsor
I play trumpet.
Amos Wilson
Okay, perfect. Do you tune trumpets much?
Guy Windsor
Well, what happens is, the pianist hits a note, and you play your usually C above middle C, and then you tune the trumpet by adjusting a slide, okay, a single slide. And then when you're playing in the lower register, the third valve is slightly sharp. And so if you really care about such things, when you're playing like D and C sharp above middle C, you'll extend that slide out a little bit with the ring finger of your left hand, and that just sort of deepens the note a little bit, flattens it out a bit, and that gets it correctly in tune. When it comes to tuning a trumpet, that's basically all there is to it. You either move the big slide out or in a bit, or when you're playing on the third valve, you'll move the little slide out or in a little bit.
Amos Wilson
I also play bagpipes.
Guy Windsor
They don’t tune at all! They just make noise. I didn’t say that, that’s not true at all.
Amos Wilson
You can tune the drones, but yes, the chanter itself, and they're purposefully not in tune to a Western scale, so several of the notes are slightly sharp or slightly flat, and it's always like, sorry, guys.
Guy Windsor
What is the scale that they tuned to?
Amos Wilson
So it is the Gaelic scale. I think that's what it's called. Basically the Scots just, they have a scale. It's, I think it's basically predates Bach, because Bach did a lot to standardise how the scale, the intervals in the scales are tuned. Because before then, each kind of, basically each parish, had their keyboard, their organ, or clave or whatever, tuned to slightly different variables, because you can't actually tune notes perfectly to a frequency. So you have the octave frequency, right? And if you tune notes so that they are perfectly in tune within the octave, then the notes are going to be off pitch for the third or the fifth interval. So you can tune things to the fifth, you could tune them to the thirds, or you could tune them to the octave.
Guy Windsor
And I guess that's a mathematical problem, basically.
Amos Wilson
So depending on what you tune it to, it's going to be slightly off for the whatever other frequent, whatever other interval you're trying to play. So originally, my understanding is that basically each parish just kind of did whatever their musicians.
Guy Windsor
Whatever sounded best to whoever had the most power.
Amos Wilson
Yeah, exactly, until Bach came along. And what was that series? He did series for the well tuned anyway, he did like a series of fugues, that he realised they sounded really good on his keyboard, but then he couldn't play them everywhere. And so he's like, okay, we have to do a standardised tuning system. And so Bach is the reason that all keyboards are tuned to the octave. So that's why the octave sounds really good, but if you play a third note on like a third interval, it sounds slightly dissonant. Even though, technically, there shouldn't be any dissonance there, because a third shouldn't be dissonant, but because we tune to the octave, the third is the most dissonant of the interval.
Guy Windsor
Okay, which is why it's got a name for it, like the devil's tuning, or something.
Amos Wilson
Well, no, the devil's third is a minor third.
Guy Windsor
Okay. I had no expectation that we were going to get into the tuning of organs today, but very glad we did. It is fascinating.
Amos Wilson
So yes, there is a moment when piano tuning, that is, I've never experienced this doing anything else where, and I don't know how much that, because this doesn't affect bagpipes or guitars or any other instrument I've tuned, but because each note on the piano, most of them are three strings together, yeah, and they're pretty long strings, and when you're sitting there just banging the key over and over again and just tweaking it by about two hours in, like your ears start becoming accustomed to all of this whole level of harmonics that you're not usually noticing. You're usually just noticing the single note, but because of the string waves, there's all this level of harmonics that's actually happening.
Guy Windsor
So there's a depth and complexity to the note that you don't notice.
Amos Wilson
You don't usually notice, but it's always there. But when you're sitting on a piano for hours on end, and it's perfectly quiet and you're just hitting the notes over and over, it's almost like going into a meditative state, and all of a sudden it's so much easier to tune, because you can hear, oh, that harmonic has to match that harmonic. And it's not just the single note that you're tuning. I've never experienced that doing anything else where, like, your brain expands.
Guy Windsor
So you're tuning each of those three strings individually.
Amos Wilson
Correct.
Guy Windsor
So three strings for one note, so you hit the key, and the hammer hits three strings at once, and you have to tune each of those. So that's like 240 strings or something.
Amos Wilson
Well, so the lower you get, fewer strings there are. I forget exactly where it is, but you go down to two strings, and then the last couple notes are only one string, and they're super chunky.
Guy Windsor
Is that why? Because my mum's a piano teacher, and has been for, like, must be 50 years, at least now, and she, back in the 80s, just hated electric pianos. But when, when we moved here, and my kids were thinking about maybe trying a bit of piano, or whatever, she bought us an electric piano, because these days, they're actually good enough for a kid to learn on, by her standards. Is it the complexity of the note that's different, do you think?
Amos Wilson
So early keyboards, they are like electric pianos, they only played the single note, but slowly, they've been doing a better job about artificially creating that level of harmonics behind the notes that is what you hear on a live piano.
Guy Windsor
That is fascinating. Okay, now, as a woodworker, I have to ask about the carpentry. So I used to be a cabinet maker.
Amos Wilson
The carpentry was an actual profession where it was a local, what did he call himself? He owned a construction company. And at the time I was working a sales job at a hardware store, and he was like, hey, do you want to come work for me? And so I did. So it was mostly like rough carpentry. Some trim carpentry never got into cabinet making, or any of the fun bits of carpentry.
Guy Windsor
So my understanding of the words: carpenters build wooden houses, joiners put in the doors and windows, and cabinet makers make the furniture to go in the house just to kind of scale. So you were doing mostly carpentry and a bit of joinery.
Amos Wilson
Very little joinery. He hung most of the doors. I suppose I did do most of the windows.
Guy Windsor
It's so hard, hanging a door correctly. It’s so hard.
Amos Wilson
I suppose I did do a handful of windows for him, but yes, he did most of the doors,
Guy Windsor
Windows are easier.
Amos Wilson
And we were replacing old windows. So yeah, we didn't really have to do all of the shimming, and yeah, all of that fun, technical stuff.
Guy Windsor
Just for the average listener, who's probably never even thought about hanging a door. If you hang a door correctly, it will, as long as there's no actual like, draft or breeze, you can open it to any point in its opening arc, and it will just stay where you put it. That is a correctly hung door. And when you close the door, it fits neatly in the frame without any significant gaps. I mean, there has to be a gap around the frame where it can't close, but it's an even gap, and it looks neat and tidy. And that doesn't sound like very much, but if you're doing it the traditional way. I mean, these days, people buy pre made frames with doors already installed, and they just install the frame, and all you have to do is make sure the frame is truly plum and the door will hang correctly. But in the old days, the frame was put in, and then you basically adjust the door to fit the frame, and then you'd hang the door in the frame. And, yeah, that is a black art.
Amos Wilson
He specialised in renovating pre existing houses. So there was a couple times where we got a call where it's like, this door does not fit in the frame anymore. It is swollen, or the house is settled, or whatever, and we had to remove the old door and then plane it down and get it so it perfectly fits. That was very tedious work.
Guy Windsor
And it doesn't take much to get it completely wrong. And it's really obvious when it's wrong. If you know what you're looking at, it's really obvious.
Amos Wilson
But this is the thing though, I will still walk into people's houses and be like, oh, all that woodwork is so sloppy. But the problem is no one actually notices. And actually, it takes a lot of work to go completely unnoticed, because 90% of the population doesn't actually care, but the 10% who care, care very deeply.
Guy Windsor
You are sitting in front of a bookcase that has glass doors. Just look carefully at the top thing on the left hand door, where the left hand door, the top piece of the door. It has slipped slightly in its frame, hasn’t it? The weight of the glass has just moved the frame of the door slightly and literally from halfway around the planet, I spotted that over your shoulder within about 10 seconds of a starting to talk. I have learned to control these things, and it's not actually bothering me at all, not my door, not my problem, but when you say you walk into somebody's house and you see these things, I don't even have to walk into the house. I just talk to them over the internet, and it's like the furniture. Oh my god, the furniture. You see that cabinet behind me. I built that.
Speaker 1
Nice.
Guy Windsor
It's brown oak for the draw fronts and the frame of the doors and the frame itself. It is actually birch ply for the panels. And it's maple door knobs. I turned them myself out of a piece of maple. And the reason, the reason those door panels are plain, is because my intention was to come up with some cool designs. Because they're detachable. I can just take them out of the phone and take them to my local makerspace and on their laser burny cuttery thing, get some cool shit designs on them. But I never quite got to the point where I had the designs finalised before bad things happened with the makerspace, and it's doesn't exist anymore. One of these days, I will, I will get the designs fixed, and I'll find a place, or I will just do the pyrography myself. I have a little hand pyrograph thing. I'm not very good at pyrography, but I can give it a go. And, yeah, it's just plywood. So if needs be, if I screw one up, I could just cut a new one, pop it in it, fine. But yeah, fussy. Fussy is the word. Excellent. Okay, now you've alluded briefly to being a writer, and I know you are a writer and you write, but why don't you tell us about the books that you write?
Amos Wilson
Yes, so I have two books currently out. Actually, by the time this goes out, it'll be three books, because the third book’s coming out on Tuesday. So they are like black powder fantasy, so think like Treasure Island meets The Chronicles of Narnia.
Guy Windsor
Now that is a very good elevator pitch.
Amos Wilson
Perfect, perfect. So the basic premise is our heroine, Ella Pickering, is an introverted bookworm. She lives in this isolated mountain village, and one evening, while she's bringing out bread to the town beggar, she gets kidnapped by pirates who drag her off, and she slowly begins to realise that they think she and maybe the beggar have information on where to find this ancient Lost City of Gold in the New World. And it turns out, all she knows about it is that her father left when she was four and tried to find the City of Gold himself and died in the attempt. And that is all she knows.
Guy Windsor
Did he die or did he not come home? Okay, okay, yeah, there is no video, so Amos just raised his eyebrows suggestively, okay, all right.
Amos Wilson
The story follows as then she is trying to outsmart the pirates, trying to find this Lost City of Gold, and following the footsteps of her father. And meanwhile, she meets with people in this new world, sort of vaguely New England-esque, sort of a world as they're dealing with like labour riots, and meanwhile, the pirates are coming in, and all the time they're trying to find this Lost City of Gold. And so fun swashbuckling tale, like I said, Treasure Island meets Chronicles of Narnia, with maybe a little bit of Charles Dickens thrown in there.
Guy Windsor
And maybe a little bit of the latest Paddington movie too.
Amos Wilson
Paddington? Maybe?
Guy Windsor
The whole thing is, they go to Peru, and stuff happens, and they are trying to find this Lost City of Gold. So then top tip, it's not what you think it is, but they do find it.
Amos Wilson
I will say this in that, obviously I love Indiana Jones. There's nothing wrong with Indiana Jones.
Guy Windsor
I'm glad you said that. Hang on. My wife got me this jacket, and on the inside it says “Raiders jacket by Peter Botwright. This jacket is based on the original pattern as designed and made by me for Harrison Ford in the film, Raids of the Lost Ark.” There it is inside the jacket. This is literally same designer, same factory. It's the real thing, and I've had it for five years, and I've worn it in all sorts of places, and I've beaten the shit out of it, and it looks like I've got it yesterday. Not an Indiana Jones fan at all. There are not bull whips hanging up on that doorway. My hats. I mean.
Amos Wilson
I enjoy Indiana Jones, but I have listened to enough archeologists, and specifically archeology podcasts, to cringe so hard at, just like the looting of these.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, he's not an archeologist. He's a looter.
Amos Wilson
He's a looter. And so I'm purposely, without spoiling anything, I am purposely trying to play with a more realistic look at what an actual ancient city would be. And so, it seems a little bit like Indiana Jones or, I guess, Paddington Bear on the surface, but I am trying to be a little bit more realistic with the portrayal of these ancient sites, and also a little bit more respectful, well, it still gets pretty fantasy, so I'll leave it there.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, fair. It sounds fascinating. I think maybe I should read them. What is the age they're intended for?
Amos Wilson
So my main audience is probably like 16 year olds. I think an adult could read them and have a lot of fun with them. I try to make them more thought provoking than just a fun adventure. But, yeah, the primary audience is 16.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so they are, should we say somewhat on the accessible side. Okay, with two and almost three books out, I'm guessing this isn't how you make a living yet.
Amos Wilson
No, I want it to be,
Guy Windsor
But that would be nice, wouldn't it?
Amos Wilson
Definitely. I actually install appliances as my living for now.
Guy Windsor
Oh, so. So if I need a new dishwasher installed,
Amos Wilson
Call me up.
Guy Windsor
Bit far to come from Kansas. But maybe if I just need help over the phone installing it myself, I'll give you
Amos Wilson
There you go.
Guy Windsor
There you go. Okay, but So yes, this is what you want to do for a living, right?
Amos Wilson
This is what I want to do for a living. So, yeah, this is a four book series. The fourth book is written, ready to go, so it should be out next year, hopefully. And then I have another book in the same universe written. And that needs to be edited. And then coming November 1st, I am going to be sequestering myself and not going out in public and banging out another book.
Guy Windsor
So you sort of bang out a first draft by sticking your head down and getting the whole thing done in one go. How long does it take?
Amos Wilson
So it really depends. My most recent book that I wrote was over 200,000 words, it’s the longest book I had ever written up to that point, and I think it took me about six months to get it all hammered out, and that technically was a first draft, but it did include a lot of rewriting of earlier stuff. So it probably is more along the lines of a second draft of my previous books. The book before that, I wrote in the course of one month. It's just a fast paced action adventure, and so it didn't require a lot of complicated thought and plotting. And so I just banged it out in a single month, and that's what I'm hoping to do again this November. But that book I forgot about, it is titled Flashes of Fire, and it is a prequel to my books I currently have out. And if you sign up for my newsletter.
Guy Windsor
Oh, well done. So many people come on the podcast and they forget to actually plug their shit. So everybody listening, this is how you're supposed to do it. Sorry. Amos, I interrupted you. Plug your newsletter.
Amos Wilson
So if you sign up for the newsletter, you get a free ebook copy of Flashes of Fire, which is a standalone novel. So if you don't like it, you don't have to read any of the rest of my writing. But if you do like it, it is a prequel to The Gwambi tetralogy, which is the four books I'm currently writing.
Guy Windsor
You are doing this correctly. Where should they go?
Amos Wilson
So go to acwilson.substack.com. Or my actual website, acwilson.net.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Well done.
Amos Wilson
But the other thing is, you cannot buy Flashes of Fire. The only way you can read that book is through my newsletter.
Guy Windsor
Well done. This is how it’s done. I take it, you self publish.
Amos Wilson
I have a small independent press. Flashes of Fire I self published. And then I have a small publisher in Texas and I still maintain all the rights to my works. So I'm still independent. Most of what he does is just printing. He's somewhere between an actual publisher and a vanity press. I'm very happy with my relationship with him, and has allowed me to have a lot of freedom so that I can do whatever I want, but he's there to give me deadlines, for instance, so that I actually get stuff finished.
Guy Windsor
So he's providing, like, editing services, layouts, editing services.
Amos Wilson
Yeah, he gets it distributed for me.
Guy Windsor
Do you pay him, or does he pay you?
Amos Wilson
So the way it works is we split all costs, 50/50 until we have paid for the book, at which point I get 80% of the profits and he gets 20%.
Guy Windsor
That's an interesting model. I've not come across that model before. So let's say there's $1,000 in editing services. You pay 500 he pays 500.
Amos Wilson
Right, right. After we've made 1000 on the book, then you get 80%.
Amos Wilson
Once it is paid out. So far, none of my books have broken even yet, so I have yet to see that higher percentage. But yes.
Guy Windsor
I've not come across that model before, that is fascinating.
Amos Wilson
Yeah, he was the first one who I had seen that model with, either. And because I had seen, like, a vanity press, where you have to pay everything. But when he was pitching it to me, it was kind of fun story. I met him. He was a friend of a friend. We met at a graduation party. And my friend was like, hey, talk to Joseph. He publishes books. And I was like, oh, that's cool. I write books. And he's like, well, mostly I just republish classic pieces of literature. I'm not really looking for new authors. I'm like, that's totally fine. And he's like, but if you send me your book, I'll read it and tell you what I think. So I sent him my first book, and he, a couple months later, emailed me back and was like, okay, so I run into people all the time at parties who are like, I have a book, and usually it's garbage. I always tell them, I'm not looking for authors, but I read your book and it's really good and I want to publish it.
Guy Windsor
Excellent, so is there much in the way of swords in your books?
Amos Wilson
So yes, there, I mean, there's lots of sword fighting between these pirates, so lots of cutlasses, and I'm trying to think if I actually have rapiers, or if it's just sabres that they have. But yes, lots of swords. Lots of sword fights.
Guy Windsor
You as the author are supposed to know that.
Amos Wilson
I know, right? And I'm double thinking myself, but yeah, also a lot of tomahawks and Bowie knives and lots of Flintlock guns.
Speaker 1
So okay, yes, have you shot much Flintlock?
Amos Wilson
I've never shot a Flintlock. I’ve handled them.
Guy Windsor
Oh my god, it's the best thing. It's the best thing! And Kansas is rife with black powder shooters.
Amos Wilson
But, admission. My job, I install appliances. So I all the time, I'm just in random people's houses, and they have our random stuff on their walls. So multiple times I've been like, that's a flintlock rifle. And they're like, yeah, you want to hold it down and feel it? I'm like, yes, I do. So I've got to hold Flintlock guns a decent amount, but, yeah, never actually shot one yet.
Guy Windsor
Okay, all right, flintlock pistol is lovely. It's got a big bore. It's got lots of powder in there, and the flash in the pan is at arm's length, so you're aiming the thing, you squeeze the trigger, and you have this lovely kind of soft recoil, because the powder doesn't burn as fast as modern cordite. So instead of getting
that kind of sharp slap in the hand that you do with a modern gun, it's more of a push, and it's really nice, and there's this explosion that happens in front of your face, and all this smoke. But a musket or a rifle, Flintlock, the pan where the priming powder goes, it's what, maybe seven inches from your eye. And it's a really long barrel, and these balls are travelling quite quickly, but they're not travelling nearly as fast as a modern bullet. So when you pull the trigger and the hammer goes forward, and the flint hits the steel, the sparks go, then the flash goes, then the whole thing goes off. Ideally, the whole thing goes off. Very often it doesn’t. But the thing is, the flash goes off and there is time to flinch before the ball gets to the end of the barrel. So you have to be ready for it, and you have to just let this explosion happen six inches from your eye. Yeah, without flinching. It is so cool. It is so hard. It's so fun. And you get this, again, big, heavy gun, right? And black powder, rather than modern stuff, cordite, or whatever these days, it was cordite 50 years ago, don’t know what it is now. And you pull the trigger, and you get this, it's recoil, but it's, again, it's more of a friendly push. So the whole thing just feels completely different to shooting a modern rifle or a modern pistol. Totally. You have to try it. Well, because it is an experience. And have you shot modern guns? Well, you're an American, you live in the Midwest, you kind of have to.
Amos Wilson
We do have that issue over here.
Guy Windsor
So, just to get the difference in terms of the sensation of it, it is wildly different, and in a way that I just completely didn't expect when I got the chance to try it and, oh my god, yeah, as you can tell, I enjoyed it quite a lot. Okay, so what does everyone get wrong about swords in fiction then, do you think?
Amos Wilson
Okay, well, so obviously I am speaking as someone who is only on the outside of holding swords, not someone who's actually done it myself. But one of my pet peeves that I see in fiction is when authors, have a blanket assumption that a lighter sword is superior to, yeah. So I it's actually in all places, the Lord of the Rings. It's all over the Lord of the Rings, where they pick up the Elven swords. It's like, oh, it's so light. And I'm always like, I mean, sometimes a lighter sword would be helpful. Maybe if it's a really stabby sword, you'd want it pretty light, but you do need an amount of weight, speaking from having used like a machete to clear brush, I would never take a light machete. I would wear myself out.
Guy Windsor
And you know, generally speaking, when attack meets parry, the heavier sword wins. If they're significantly different, when the blades meet, the heavier sword will tend to dominate the lighter one, Funny how that works. Like, momentum is actually a thing, and it's proportional to mass.
Amos Wilson
I feel like I run into that all the time in like, these epic fantasies. Where it’s like, this is a dwarven made sword, and you know, it's good because it's lighter than a regular sword. And I'm always like, obviously, you don't want a super heavy, bulky sword, probably, but you do need a balance. You do need a certain amount of weight.
Guy Windsor
And the thing is, a really well made sword feels lighter than it actually is. I don't normally do unboxing videos, because that's not my thing. But I got this new longsword from Malleus Martialis a while ago, and I did an unboxing video, and kind of a test video for it, because Eleonora and Rodolfo are friends of mine in outside Florence and they run Malleus Martialis. And Rodolfo makes these swords. Eleanor designs them, and they are really, really good training swords.
Amos Wilson
They're gorgeous looking. I have not bought one. I go on Instagram and see their pictures. This is basically pornography, these swords.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I may or may not have a couple in the house of anyway, so this longsword, it came and it you can see, I'm like, puzzled by because I know that it's heavy, I’ve felt the weight of it, and it has the necessary mass to do the job, but there's something about the way the mass is distributed that means it handles like it was maybe 20% lighter than it is. And that's magic, because you get all of the humph you need when you hit stuff. All the humph is right there, but it's manoeuvrable, right? It's like having a Land Rover that handles like a Ferrari, basically. Which violates the laws of physics. I think Eleanor and Rodolfo are actually, maybe there's a bit of Narnia going on there, bit of magic. Gandalf comes around and blesses the sword or something. I don't know what they do.
Amos Wilson
Well, it's funny you say that because in my series I am working on as my next series, after the series I'm currently working on, is going to be more of like a Viking/Irish fantasy. And one of the plot points is the hero gets a magical sword. And the magic is it's technically a sword that's heavier than most swords, but when you are holding it by the handle, you do not feel any weight from the sword. You as the wielder get all the benefits of manoeuvrability of literally no weight, but the sword is actually a heavy sword.
Guy Windsor
So what's the weakness in the sword?
Amos Wilson
The weakness in the sword is it cannot kill anything.
Guy Windsor
Okay, interesting twist.
Amos Wilson
So that book series, because I like to explore elements of religion in my books. And that book series, the book title is What Immortal Hand, and it is exploring basically the shift between a polytheistic society to a monotheistic society.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so, and clearly, you're a Blake fan.
Amos Wilson
I mean, I don't know, I'd say I'm a Blake fan, but Tiger, Tiger is an excellent poem. And so, a lot of it revolves around this character, kind of trying to understand this new version of deity, like a new concept of what a god is. And so one of the things is basically non-violence, and so he's given a sword, but he can't actually kill anything with it, and so he has to work very creatively with the sword that is almost a lightsaber, in that it can just bust through shields and such, but he can't actually kill anybody, and the sword will shock him, basically with electric shock if he attempts to kill anything.
Guy Windsor
That is a very interesting restriction. Lois McMaster Bujold has something similar in her Penric and the Demon series, where, where Penric accidentally becomes a sorcerer, because this demon jumped into him, and that's how sorcerers are made in that world. And so he can do all sorts of cool magic shit, but he can't kill a person. So if a weapon’s coming towards him, and he sees it in time, his demon can rust the metal into dust. Which is cool. But if you use magic to actually kill a person deliberately, then something about the theology of that world. Are you familiar with Lois McMaster Bujold?
Amos Wilson
The name is familiar. I think my other book friends have read it.
Guy Windsor
My absolute top science fiction and some of her fantasy. Her Vorkosigan Saga is fantastic. That's sort
Amos Wilson
Vorkosigan, yes, my friend loves that.
Guy Windsor
So her Chalion series, which includes The Curse of Chalion.
Amos Wilson
Okay, yes. That is on my TBR.
Guy Windsor
Bump it to the top.
Amos Wilson
Well, the problem is, if I bump it to the top, then that's The Greatcoats that are being knocked off.
Guy Windsor
oh, that's hard. So that's hard. Oh god, okay, okay, here's what you do. Here's what you do, right? Sebastian is a friend. He's been on my show twice now. He's a very nice man. I know him personally. I've never met Lois. So read volume one of The Greatcoats first.
Speaker 1
I have read volume one.
Guy Windsor
Read volume two, next. Then take a little voice break so you get a different voice in your head for a bit and read one of the Bujolds. And maybe, rather than going straight to one of the Chalion books, go with one of the Penric books, because they're much shorter. Okay, so basically the whole Penric series, you can get it in paperback, but it's really a bunch of novellas. And so, as a nice palate cleanser between other books, they're perfect. They're just the right size for that. The one series of hers I've read it, but it didn't do it for me is her Sharing Knife series. Your mileage may differ. But I just didn't get on with it in the same way. But like, seriously, if I'm miserable, I will pick up one of the Vorkosigan books and it would just sort me out. And there's at least one of them I've read I must have read it 20 times. And it's technically a whodunnit. So clearly, it's not who did it that is the motivation, it's the characters and the positions they're put in and the and how their virtues and their vices sort of inform their decisions and the struggle to let virtue come to the surface, when Vice is so tempting. She's just brilliant. Maybe Penric, just because it has that same restriction because, again, the whole thing about magic is, if you don't have the restrictions, the magic is pointless.
Amos Wilson
Exactly, exactly,
Guy Windsor
One of the things that always bothers me in fiction, I assume this this heroine of yours is going to have to learn some fighting skills at some point.
Amos Wilson
So that is actually one of the things I love about my books, is, no, she doesn't.
Guy Windsor
Oh, really.
Amos Wilson
Did you ever read kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson?
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Long ago, maybe 40 years ago.
Amos Wilson
I fell in love with that book because the hero never has to fight. He always comes up with other ways to solve his problems. Because you wouldn't say that David Balfour from kidnapped is a weak character. But like the scene in that book that I was just like, this is brilliant, is when he stuck on this tidal island within sight of land, but he can't swim. And so I was used to reading these action adventure novels where the hero could just swim across, no problem. But instead we have to sit there with David Balfour with this problem that I'm used to the heroes being able to solve themselves, and instead he has to come up with another way to solve his problems, because he's not that physically capable. And that was the moment where it's like, I love heroes who have these things. They're not the superheroes. They're average people. So for my series, the Gwambi tetralogy, there are four protagonists that I follow the whole time. Of them, three of them do have physical skills in fighting, so there are heroes that do the fighting, but the heroine of the whole series, Ella. She's just an introverted bookworm. She is problem solver. She solves her problems in other ways than fighting because she cannot fight.
Guy Windsor
Wow, that's a bold move.
Amos Wilson
Well, I hope it paid off.
Guy Windsor
I am sure the people listening will read the books, and then they will let you know, and the best way they let you know that is if they buy the next one.
Amos Wilson
Exactly. I've had a decent number of beta readers read it, and so far, people like seem to like it, as far as I can tell.
Guy Windsor
Okay, and you have your newsletter so people can get a free book.
Amos Wilson
Exactly, yes, the free book is a lot more sword fighting, more of just a straight up three musketeers, sort of a situation where all of the heroes are sword fighty people. If you want lots of sword fighting and lots of black powder action sequences, then Flashes of Fire, the free ebook is a good place to start.
Guy Windsor
There you go plugging it again, I love it. Okay, so you've done a whole bunch of different things. So I have to ask, what is the best idea you haven't acted on yet?
Amos Wilson
Okay, so the best idea I haven't acted on is I would like to write a history book that centres on the experience of the HMS Inflexible, the battle cruiser the HMS Inflexible during the Great War. Because battle cruisers were this really unique piece of naval technology that basically only existed during World War I, that was really the only time they were used and the HMS Inflexible, as far as my limited amount of research has gone, is the only ship, let alone the only battle cruiser, to have been evolved involved in every single major theatre of World War I in the naval war.
Guy Windsor
Really? Okay, just for listeners who don't have a naval history background, what is a battle cruiser, exactly, and how is it different?
Amos Wilson
So basically, in this period and the late 1800s when the navies of the world are transitioning from sail power to steam power, and going from wooden ships to steel ships, you had a lot of questions about then, how do you design a ship to fit this new mould? What's going to be the most powerful ship? And the big piece of naval technology was what they called the all big gun ships. So it used to be in naval and sailing ships and wooden ships, you would put, you know, 120 cannons in there, and then just go up alongside and blow your opponent to pieces. But once steel ships came in about, you had to have a really high calibre gun to actually pierce your opponent's ship. And so going from used to be able to fit 120 cannons to now you went down to like, six guns, and that was all you could fit on these giant ships, because these were massive guns. And they originally explored having, like, smaller calibre guns and big calibre guns, but it took up so much extra space in the hold to have separate all of these different calibres of ammunition. So they went with the all big gunship, and that was called the Dreadnought, this massive ship, massive guns. And the problem, though, was the dreadnoughts were relatively slow, and so the theorists realised you were going to have this problem of dreadnoughts close to home. While, meanwhile, most of the action would be performed by these small level ships, like destroyers, hitting merchant vessels. And the dreadnoughts were too slow to catch destroyers. So what they did is they created this concept of the battle cruiser, which had all of the hitting power of a dreadnought, so it usually had two less guns. So these were like four gunships, but all heavy guns, but very, very little armour. Because the principle was you needed these things to go fast and hit hard so that they could hit these small crafts and protect shipping. But it turned into this very strange thing where these were really powerful ships, but they were also super vulnerable. You have several times where a single torpedo destroys this entire ship and kills like 400 sailors, because they had so little armour. And so there's this really fascinating piece of naval technology, and they only existed for a certain time and, like I said, one of these ships, the HMS Inflexible, was at every single major naval theatre at major engagements in WWI.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so the North Sea and the Dardanelles and Gallipoli.
Amos Wilson
So the three major theatres. You have the North Sea, which climaxes at Jutland, and then you have the Dardanelles, where the HMS Inflexible was hit by a torpedo and had to be towed out of the Dardanelles. And that event is what triggered the Navy pulling back and sending in the Anzac corps into the Dardanelles was HMS Inflexible was hit. Then the other one, which is my favourite, is the South Seas campaign, where this German Admiral, who's stuck on the other side of the world, decides to just do his best to get back to Germany, and so starts in China and just starts looting his way across the South Sea, and then destroys five British ships that he destroyed off of the coast of Chile. And in response, the Inflexible, freshly repaired from her torpedo in the Dardanelles, gets sent off and meets this German battle cruiser off Falkland Island and has an epic naval fight that ends in sinking Admiral von Spee and his poor German soldiers. The three major campaigns are the Battle of the Falklands, the Battle of the Dardanelles...
Guy Windsor
So do you want to write a history of that ship?
Amos Wilson
I think would be cool to write a fiction book. So along the lines of, like, The Band of Brothers that looks at World War II, but through the perspective of a single unit, there's the same sort of thing, but for a naval history of World War I, through the perspective of this one ship, because the HMS Inflexible gives us this unique opportunity to view every single aspect of World War I from a single ship.
Guy Windsor
It would naturally be a three volume series.
Amos Wilson
You could do three volumes. Yes, depends on if, once I start digging into it, I realise it needs to be three volumes. Problem is, I've never written history before. I'm very intimidated by writing history books. So it may never happen, but I think it's a good idea.
Guy Windsor
Here's the thing. If I was you, I would start by putting in a magical element. Just hear me out, right? Like, for instance, I don't know a parrot on the ship that can always tell the direction and can send messages back to London or whatever. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what the magical element is. Maybe it's a unicorn, right? Or a dragon, an actual dragon. Captain has a pet dragon. And the thing is, you write the book with that and see what you have, and if it all seems to work as a kind of quirky fantasy, that's the book. And if anything in it is inaccurate, you could just say, Dude, it's a fantasy. There's a dragon. I mean, what do you want, that particular obscure naval vessel had this calibre of gun on it, not that calibre of gun on it, you completely ignorant person who's just written a whole bunch of books. You know what people can be like. There was a cowboy series that had a unicorn in it. I forget the author who wrote it, 19th century cowboy stuff, classic cowboy stuff. I think they didn't want people emailing them saying they got the specific model of Colt revolver wrong for that year or whatever, right? So, they put a unicorn in, just so that no one could be a history Nazi about it. Dude, there's a unicorn. But then when you look at it, you can just take out the dragon or whatever you choose to put in. If it's all solid and it works better as a history book. You just take out that unnecessary component. It's the thing that just gave you permission to write the whole thing. This is a permission question. Because absolutely everyone who ever got really good at writing history wrote bad history first. And sometimes that sadly made it out into the world, but very often it got either fixed by the editor or just scrapped and something else was written. But the way you learn to write good history is you write bad history first, and you just have to have permission to write the bad history. So whatever you need to do to give yourself the permission, if you like, I have a fuck ton of books, and some of them are quite historical. I hereby grant you permission to write a crap history of the Inflexible which can then hopefully be turned into a good one. So the next time we talk, you'll have a different what is the best idea you haven't acted on yet. All right. Now I usually finish with the question, somebody gives you a million dollars to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide, but that isn't your area? So what is your area?
Amos Wilson
Okay, let's see. I would, I think would be very helpful for specifically, writers who are writing historical or even any kind of violence in their book. It would be helpful to have a because this is the problem I run into, is I'm like, Okay, if so and so actually got stuck there with a sword. What does that mean? So I'm going to Google, and I'm like, what happens if you get stuck with a sword through your left rib. And then I'm probably getting ended up on some kind of a watch list for googling very violent stuff, I don't know. I would fund some kind of a resource where writers could be looking up injuries so that you can have an accurate depiction of injuries and how serious they are based off of the violence that you are writing. Specifically, because I want to get away from the you hit someone in the head, they're knocked out, they wake up a couple hours later and face no consequences because I'm like, no. If you get hit in the head hard enough to pass out, you're probably going to be dealing with that for the rest of your life.
Guy Windsor
At least for a little while, yeah.
Amos Wilson
You don’t want the person who read your fantasy book to just decide that that's okay to try to do, because that has serious consequences.
Guy Windsor
Like, yeah, and, I mean, we saw in a historical, not historical, but a rapier tournament this year, an untipped rapier, a blunt rapier, but without a tip on it, got caught in the guy's arm somewhere and ended up basically in his back. It did horrible damage. And, yeah, I don't know what the full story of it and I don't know what the true outcomes of that are, but the point is, it was a single shot to the arm with a blunt sword that has really serious consequences. But at the same time, we have historical records. I'm thinking of the Duel of the Hat, which I think Hutton recounts it in his Sword in the Centuries, but I may be wrong, but it's a famous duel called the duel of the hat, where I'm blanking on the names these basically, one person sends a very extravagant hat to another person and said, you wear this in the main square at this time on this day in peril of your life. And so the person, of course, puts it on, and it goes to the square, and they have a fight. And the way it's described is they end up basically bleeding from multiple wounds on the ground, and one of them uses a dagger like an ice axe, to kind of climb their way up the other person's body, to stab them in the face. It is really, really fucking nasty, multiple critical injuries that you think any one or two of them would be enough, at least one of them survived. So, these crazy things happen, like there are people who have been shot through the heart who survive, and, okay, I went on this amazing series of knife fighting courses about 20 years ago, run by a guy called Kai Wessersund in Finland. And one of the one of the modules in these knife courses, was a pathologist came in and talked to us about knife injuries and gun injuries and the sort of injuries, exactly the sort of thing you're talking about, right? And he said that what happens is, if your heart is in the process of contracting and something goes through it, you get a hole which leaks blood, and you have minutes to live, unless some critical intervention occurs. If it happens to be expanding, receiving new blood, and it gets hit, it explodes, and you die instantly. So, it is possible, I mean, and get this, I have actually seen photos from the surgery where this kid fell into a quarry in the 1980s and sort of got a rusty spike in through his waist and out through his shoulder, and it went through the pericardium on the way. The lead surgeon who did the surgery that kind of got this spike out, and of course, it was they took photographs of the whole thing, because this was really interesting. He actually gave a lecture at my school. So I saw these pictures of this. It was for people doing A Level Biology. It wasn’t everyone. It was just the biologists. We were assumed to have an interest in these things. And so you could literally see this rusty steel spike through somebody's heart, because they've got his chest open, and there it is, and he's alive. Now, without modern surgery, he would have been dead within hours. But hours, not seconds, because it took a while to get him out of the quarry and into probably a helicopter to the hospital. I forget the details, but extraordinary things can happen. So sorry. I'm getting super excited. I think your idea brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant, because it is, on the one hand, these injuries are way worse than we give them credit for. But on the other hand, sometimes they are way less than we assume. And there are all sorts of ways around it. I’ve seen photographs, I think it was in the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, a bloke who had basically, you know how you do ear piercings, nose piercings, that kind of stuff. Well, I don't personally, but people do. He had this thing where he had made insertions through his body so he could put seven foils through himself at once. Because the way he did it, and this early 20th century, late 19th century, this is pretty much pre antibiotics, as I recall. But what he'd done was he'd made the piercing sort of bit by bit, and used a blunt needle to make the hole so that instead of cutting through arteries and cutting through organs and stuff, it just sort of pushed them out of the way, and then left these needles in, I forget the details, but left these needles in so that a sort of scar develops around them. So he had these holes through his body that he could stick these foils through. For what purpose, I cannot imagine, but I have seen the pictures.
Amos Wilson
Maybe for like stage fights, to make them look idealistic.
Guy Windsor
Well, I don't think you can, no, I think it was more like a circus, something like that. Here's the incredible Guy who can stick seven swords through his body and not be harmed. And people are like, What the actual fuck. David Blaine sticks a needle through his hand, because he's a fucking lunatic, right? But this guy was sticking seven swords through his body, and he is absolutely insane, but it can be done. I think the resource you're talking about is long overdue. That's what you spend the money on getting someone to develop that resource? I wonder how it should be created.
Amos Wilson
In my mind, it would almost be like a Wikipedia sort of style, where you can look things up.
Guy Windsor
It's a research resource, rather than, I mean, maybe it should have a book in it somewhere.
Amos Wilson
I mean, you could do a book, although my goal would be to make it so that it's not behind a paywall, so that any poor indie author can just access the resource.
Guy Windsor
But you can make the ebook free. And just charge cost for the print books. I mean, a guy called Derek Sivers just made all of his ebooks free for a week or something, if you're on his mailing list, and during that week, also, sadly, it'll be over by the time this goes out. You could get his hard backs at cost, which is like six bucks for printing and six bucks for shipping, just because he wants his ideas out in the world. And frankly, he doesn't have to worry about money, because he's the guy who founded CD Baby and sold it for like, $20 million and gave almost all of it to charity. Because he said he didn't need the money Interesting chap. So there are ways of making it a book without putting it behind a paywall. But also, you'd want videos.
Amos Wilson
Yeah, videos would be helpful. Especially you could have actually get like, medical doctors in there. That would be cool to have actual pictures and diagrams.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that would be cool, huh? Do you know, next time somebody asks, What's the best idea you haven't acted on yet? I might just say, well, I was talking to this chap, Amos, because we make all sorts of weird assumptions about how sword fight will actually go. Have you ever been hit really hard in the leg? Like, somebody who really knows how to kick hits you in the side of the leg. Do you know what happens?
Amos Wilson
I'm assuming it like hits a nerve.
Guy Windsor
You just fall down. Like, literally, you just fall on your ass, and then the pain hits, first the leg, then your ass and then you kind of go, oh, what the fuck was that? And then you kind of stagger to your feet and go, I'll get you, you bastard. But you see in fencing, like somebody tags somebody in the leg, and then a full beat later, I mean, if it's simultaneous, that's different, but a full beat later, someone like strikes over the arm or strikes over their head or whatever. And it's like that could happen, but also it could be that your leg falls out from under you, because you just got a cleaver stuck in it and seriously, if you if you end up sparring with someone who's really good at kicking up, like Kung Fu, Tae Kwon Do or karate or something like that, and they land a really meaty shot in the side of your thigh or in the side of your shin. I mean, if the shot lands right, that's it. You're done. Because it's a structural thing. It's not a pain control, like if you twist somebody's wrist and they don't want the wrist to break, so you can move them along, or think finger locks, for example, which are pain controls. It's a mechanical issue of you're a biped, and one half of your biped just stopped working. But again, sometimes they kick you in the leg, it doesn't hit quite the right spot. And you’re still standing.
Amos Wilson
Because both the side of how an injury will actually affect you in the moment. But then also, I'm also very interested in the actual, realistic recovery from some of these injuries, because it always bugs me when the hero gets stabbed in the meat of the arm, and then they patch it all up, and then the next minute they’re sword fighting again, and I'm like guys.
Guy Windsor
I stopped watching a TV series recently, because this, like 60, 70, year old man who is not a martial artist or anything, he's just a criminal. So, I mean, it does make a big difference if you have long experience of dealing with being hit. Because someone who's never been like punched before, the first time they get punched, the shock and the surprise of it can be incapacitating in a way that the actual physical injury might not be. So this guy is not experienced of violence. He gets shot through the flesh of the upper arm with a nine millimetre. That's not a very big bullet, but it's big enough. It's been going right past the humerus, so it really ought to break the bone. Maybe it didn't. Maybe he got lucky. So let's say the bone didn't break. But still, he's just been shot through the upper arm, and literally, in this thing, he has like, a bandage over or something, and then he puts his jacket on and just carries on with his day. It's like, what? I don't mind if, if you know the hero, sort of battles on, and it's all terribly difficult and painful because he's been shot and but no, it's like this elderly man with no martial experience, no sort of resources to draw on, no experience to draw on. He just gets shot through the arm, and it's basically not even an event. He's just like it stops him for it stops him for maybe 10 minutes of subjective time, right? So maybe a minute of screen time. Really? No. It just annoyed me too much. I think I'd be a really good resource. And I'm just thinking of what pathologists do I know. I have enough work to do. I have books to write.
Amos Wilson
I’m sorry for giving you a good idea.
Guy Windsor
All right, so just to finish off, is there anything that you want to bring up that we haven't talked about? Anything that we've missed?
Amos Wilson
Nothing's coming to mind right away.
Guy Windsor
Well, generally speaking, I don't like to finish on something which is me talking for ages, and my guest is sort of nodding and smiling. That's okay. That's okay. We'll leave this little bit in, and everyone will go, all right, that's a nice behind the scenes thing. Excellent. Well, it's been lovely talking today, Amos. It's nice to see you again.
Amos Wilson
Yes. Thank you. You too. Bye.
