It is probably too late, but I don't want to get a reputation for saying I am going to do something and not do it.

The past few months have been chaotic; a death, a cancer scare, new medical problems ... you know. Life stuff. Life and death.

But SPONSOR MAGAZINE and the SPONSOR 101 DISK are moving forward. I just won't announce anything new until it is actually ready for you.

It will be announced here, first, then by email.

Delay delay

I'm several months behind on the third issue of SPONSOR MAGAZINE. Things happen.

For the past five years my dad has been in decline and over the past six months we have been dealing with the real end-of-life issues, up until he died in the middle of February. Thanks to both of us working our programs, we were clean with each other and he got what he wanted at the end - he said he wanted to die in his sleep, with no idea what was happening. He got his wish. He died with 51 years of sobriety.

I have 27 years, just over half and while it is all one day at a time, that 51-year thing still impresses me.

During dad's drama I did not take good care of myself and have had two months of my own health dramas.

But Issue #3 is in final edit and should be released - shortly. We have a new editor working with us and a couple of articles intended for this issue did not arrive ... we're working on it.

But it should be worth the wait.

A New Friend

I'm happy to say that there is a new relationship between all of the Anonymous Review projects (including Sponsor Magazine) and Silkworth.net, a long-standing source of academic and scholarly documentation for recovery and its history.

There are two other sites that as important for any serious student of 12-Step history and I hope to announce similar relationships with those excellent sites.

I am transcribing the talk by Dr. Harry Tiebout from the 1960 3rd International in Long Beach, California. It should appear in SPONSOR #3, which may make it out before Thanksgiving.

What Dr. Tiebout has to say is important, but he speaks in the academic, 1930s kind of language which becomes difficult to follow. The phrases loop around each other with many conditional statements inserted in the same sentence. It was clearly a paper intended for an academic audience, to the casual reader.

He had a special viewpoint as therapist for Bill Wilson and also for Marty Mann, a significant early member of AA and co-founder of the National Council on Alcoholism (now the National Council on Alcoholism and Addiction).

But it is worth reading so I will plod away at starting and stopping the recording so I can get the words on paper (or on the screen).

Dancing, Dancing

Dancing as fast as I can. But things are moving again. SPONSOR MAGAZINE #3 should be out by the end of October. The first of the CD Disk projects should be up about the same time - possibly two of them. I'm putting off podcast production while I deal with medical and automotive problems. And a former sponsee was found dead in an abandoned building last weekend - keeps me grounded and focused on the real result from Step Twelve.

Preparing the Discs

I'm going to take advantage of the work I've done preparing for these disks over the past two years and release four of them very quickly. All will be posted for free download as an iso disk image (for the real geeks out there), and through the print-on-demand service that handles CD duplication.

The disks are self-paced computer disks with and easy to use "web page" interface to allow you to reach any file with just a couple of clicks. The first four disks are:

• THE SPONSOR DISK with lots of speakers and a resource library.
• THE STEPS GROUPED with lots of speakers on the Steps as they work together, and an in-depth exploration of the Traditions. Includes the bookmarked PDF for A Recovery Reader and the Inventory Guide "Simple Directions" as a printable PDF.
• The first two volumes of ANONYMOUS REVIEW, which includes all 27 podcasts from Volume 1 ("In their own words, in their own voices") and 50 podcasts from Volume 2 (The Virtual Speaker Meeting).

The fifth disk will be devoted to the Inventory process, from Steps 4 to 9, treated individually but really in-depth.

Meanwhile, progress has been delayed on the next podcast series because of time spent re-engineering the sound files for the first series of CD disks, but it will happen.

Pleasure of the Past

Before mastering the disks for the new series of CDs, I am re-engineering each episode of the podcasts and am enjoying a) hearing them again and b) removing the "voice of doom" from the beginning of each podcast. They are all going to be on one disk so the repetitious announcement is not required.

The whole series is also available for free download through archive.org - links to the archives are posted at the home site: http://anonymousreview.org.