RIP

I'm late to this.

Tim Bown's book, "Leading the Way: Maximize Your Potential as a Martial Arts Instructor" is out and available on kindle.


He wrote the manuscript.  And then he died.  First day on the job with the Canadian Border Patrol (the real job, he'd completed the academy) Tim collapsed.  Dead very quickly.  Autopsy found him eaten up with cancer.

Editing it was hard.  It's a first book from a brilliant instructor.  One of the few people who ran a successful dojo without dumbing it down or selling out.  Tim could fight and he could teach and his students were good.  But it was still a first book.  And a last.  Had he been alive, the editing process would have been very different.  There would have been lots of late-night phone calls, "What did you mean here?  Double check that, US law is different.  Too much on the writing process."  And each question would have turned into a long talk.  And I would have learned.

Posthumous, the process is different-- make sure the book is all Tim.  But there is a lot of regret over the conversations (and the brawling sessions and the scenarios) we will never have.

Enough about that.  Tim was a premier trainer in scenarios, the best role-player I have ever worked with.  And this book isn't about that.  It's about running a traditional dojo (a lot about teaching kids, which is the bread-and-butter of many schools) and doing it effectively and with integrity.  He covers a lot and he covers it well.  I don't know another book on teaching MA of this quality.  And it will be his last book.  All proceeds go to his wife and daughter, who he adored.