Since I’m setting up a print-on-demand publishing operation for the enterprise-architecture books anyway, it seems to make sense to bring some of my other former titles out of retirement, in particular:
- Pendulum Dowsing (aka ‘Elements of Pendulum Dowsing) – originally published by the now-departed Element Books in 1989
- The Dowser’s Workbook (aka ‘Discover Dowsing’) – originally published by Thorsons, also in 1989
If I can get my act together in time, and if I can make sense of the whole ISBN / print-on-demand confusion, I would hope to have them out in time for the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury in mid-May, ‘cos I’m supposed to be spouting there and I’s gotta pay me way somehow. 
As far as I can do the costings, it looks like I should be able to get them out for around GBP9.95 and GBP11.95 respectively. But is there a realistic market for them, at that price, or at all? Comments and suggestions would be much appreciated…
Whilst doing the usual web-trawls for a correspondent, was delighted to discover that Common Ground have put their classic Rules for Local Distinctiveness up as a specific page on their website, as well as the poster which can be ordered from their shop.
May not be so obvious at first, but the principles they describe are also just as important for business, as a guide to understanding their own ‘distinctiveness’ or business-purpose within the chosen market. Hence I’ve also tagged this one in the Business and Futures categories here.
Use Common Ground’s list as a way to reflect on the ‘particularity’ of any place, any enterprise, any context… it’s a worthwhile exercise that will almost always elicit some important surprises…
Callanish, by Liz Poraj-Wilczynska – oil on canvas, 35.5cm x 25.5cm.
Now completed the first drafts of both the two new chapters for the new edition of Needles of Stone, and selected the cover-art – a painting of Callanish by archaeological-illustrator / artist Liz Poraj-Wilczynska. More later on this an other related projects coming up over the next few months.
A fun weekend at the British Society of Dowsers‘ conference. About 150 people there. I ran two workshops (on my use of the traditional Cretan-style labyrinth as a metaphor of the skills-learning process) and did a keynote presentation (on the role of theory in dowsing), plus innumerable fairly intense conversations, hence pretty much exhausted by the time I got home.
Good to see there’s far less ‘newage’ in the field these days (‘newage’? – the correct pronunciation for far too much so-called ‘New Age’ guff, it rhymes with ‘sewage’, the discarded remnant of what was once nutritious… ::wrygrin:: ). Far less of the gosh-wow ‘earth-energies’ delusions, and far more of real people doing real concrete work, such as the Village Water crew doing well-finding in India and Africa, and a new manual on survey techniques for dowsing in support of physical archaeology.
Kind of scary at times, though. I did my best-known book on dowsing more than thirty years ago, and haven’t really contributed to the field at all for the last twenty, so I’d rather expected that people would have forgotten me by now. Far from it – yikes! A fair number of people seemed to think of me as some kind of ‘star’ – I think I’ve managed to dispel that particular delusion, at least… – whilst several said they’d wanted to meet me for decades. One even told me that he’d used my long-out-of-print Needles of Stone as his example of “a book that changed my life” for a radio-programme on that theme; very kindly, he even gave me a tape of the programme.
Hence scary, because it really brings home the responsibility of authors for their impact on others; scary too because I just wasn’t – and still am not – equipped to cope with that kind of attention. I’m a very ordinary bloke who has the misfortune to tend to see things somewhat differently from others: I don’t enjoy either being put up on some kind of bizarre pedestal for that mistake, or – worse, and far more common for me – being used as some kind of metaphoric or even literal punchbag when others get upset at my ‘heresies’. I’m sorry: I do seem to see things differently than most, and no amount of telling myself otherwise, or trying to force myself to hide from that fact, seems to be able to stop it happening to me and around me. Most of the time it ain’t fun; just nice to be in a place where it was fun for a change!
Off to the British Society of Dowsers annual conference this weekend – looking forward to meeting up with Paul Devereux and other long-time friends and colleagues from (yikes!) twenty to thirty or more years ago. The BSD have perhaps foolishly asked me to present, so I’ll be revisiting the theme of the role of theory in dowsing – “half-baked or overcooked?” – that I did for the American Society of Dowsers west-coast conference the best part of a decade ago. More on that later if anyone’s interested.
Only worry is that it’s been a long time since I’ve pushed a pendulum around in earnest: kind of been side-tracked on other ideas for the past couple of decades. Guess I can trust that it’ll all come back to me somehow, like riding a bicycle, but I’m all too aware that those sort-of-senses are more than a little rusty these days!
Returning to England, I’m delighted to see Common Ground have been at it again: this time a magnificent new tome, “England In Particular: a celebration of the commonplace, the local, the vernacular and the distinctive”, Sue Clifford, Angela King and others for Common Ground; pub. Hodder & Stoughton 2006; ISBN 0 340 82616 9; price £30.
Sue Clifford and Angela King pretty much are Common Ground: the grand masters of local distinctiveness, localised knowledge and the nature of ‘place’. Much to learn there for anyone involved in narrative knowledge and the ‘groundedness’ of social networks; also for geomancers too, of course.
