Tom Graves

I’ve now published the annotated version of my film-script ‘Wombat & Cockie‘ in book-form – see the Tetradian Books website here for the book-info, and here for the free-download PDF e-book.

Set in the drug-gangs culture of present-day Melbourne, it’s an odd mixture of a cops-and-criminals black-comedy, merged with a Dreamtime motif in which all of the players enact the characteristics and character of the respective bird or animal Dreaming.

Of all my scripts, this is the one most likely to reach production: a colleague spent some time a couple of years ago developing it further, but I haven’t heard from her since. Not that it matters: it’s just a bit of fun, really, though there are some serious themes behind it, using fiction to explore the complexities of interlinked transactions of violence and abuse at a societal level.

My regular outing to make use of Lightning Source’s annual ‘free setup’ promotion, it’s technically vanity-publishing – but I spent at least six months writing the script, so it seems worthwhile to get something tangible out of all that work! It won’t be available in printed form, other than direct from me, but anyone is welcome to download the e-book for free.

Hope it helps, anyway: “Share and Enjoy”?

A very definite “Thank you” to POD printers Lightning Source, who’ve not only turned round my new book The Service-Oriented Enterprise in the startling time of just under four days from first uploading the initial source-files to the first box of books arriving at my door, but have also just notified me that my ‘low priority’ order for some other books has already been shipped after just two days, and should be with me tomorrow morning.

I’ve always been impressed by their service, but this time they’ve really done me proud. I was afraid I wouldn’t have the books in time before I had to leave for the TOGAF conference next weekend, but I’m now a week ahead of schedule on that. Many thanks.

Recommended.

There’s something special about holding a brand new book for the first time…

The first set of Silos came back from print-on-demand providers Lightning Source today – impressed, as I hadn’t expected them to deliver before Christmas. Quite odd, really – holding something so tangible that’s come out of a lot of hard work but has in many ways been otherwise entirely virtual.

Will be sending copies off over the next few days to various colleagues scattered around the globe who’ve contributed ideas and critique. But this one was hard in unexpected ways, and took a surprisingly long time – almost seventeen months from start to finish, compared to less than three months for Disciplines, and barely a month for SEMPER and SCORE (though that one was more of a glue-it-together process, since I had most of the material already in other forms). So yeah, an odd kind of extended labour: doesn’t compare in the literal maternal sense, of course, but a valid metaphor at least.

Odd… nothing quite like it… the pleasure of holding a new book…

Forgot to mention that a couple of weeks back I finalised an agreement with IT Governance Ltd for on-selling my Tetradian Enterprise Architecture Series books. That includes both print editions and e-book editions (which is why I pulled the full e-book versions of those books from the Tetradian Books website and replaced them with ’sampler’ versions).

IT Governance are able to promote the books to the industry in ways that I just don’t have the skills or time to do, which leaves me free to concentrate on writing! Links are as follows:

• Real Enterprise Architecture: beyond IT to the whole enterprise: print and e-book
• SEMPER and SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness: print and e-book
• Power and Response-ability: the human side of system: print and e-book

I’m at last in the final stages of finishing Bridging the Silos: enterprise architecture for IT-architects (just writing the last chapter now – hooray! ), so that’ll be available on the IT Governance site pretty much as soon as it’s done.

They’ve also commissioned me to do two small books in their Pocket Guide series – one on enterprise architecture, the other on business architecture.  Scheduled to deliver those by end of February, so will write more about those when we get closer to the time.

Moving on, anyway.

Once again been brought face to face with my failings as a theorist, a writer, a publisher, in some senses even as a human being. Just had another really solid reminder that I don’t fit here, in any sense – or even in any ‘here’, it seems.

After yet another farrago for my would-be publishing, where the planned launch for the new book Disciplines of Dowsing at the British Society of Dowsers congress didn’t actually happen – everyone involved just kind of forgot, I guess – I’ve been taking stock of the actual results of my Tetradian Books venture, and together with that, the whole of the last couple of years’ work and being. Not exactly inspiring, really.

Some examples:

• Total sales at Megalithomania, back in May, where we supposedly launched the new edition of Needles of Stone: eight books (of which only four were the new book); total income, perhaps £70 at best; total cost to go there, a bit more than £300; overall loss, around £250 or so.

• Total sales at BSD congress, this weekend: eleven books retail, plus perhaps 20 wholesale; total income, perhaps £250 at best; total cost to go there, about £350; overall loss, around £100 or so.

• Total online sales of all six titles since May: 67 books; total income, somewhat under £500; total setup cost, somewhat over £1100; overall loss to date, around £650 or so.

So the effective financial result of six months’ flat-out full-time work since March, when the first title went off to press, is that I’ve wasted yet another thousand quid or thereabouts. That’s not including any of the frightening costs of living in this obscenely expensive country, either. Not exactly pension-fund material, shall we say.

In terms of impact, towards creating constructive change anywhere, all my efforts have fared just about as well as my finances. Precisely one (count ‘em – one) person in this benighted country has come close to a real understanding what I’m trying to do in enterprise architecture. If I’m lucky, the best I get from most people in ‘the trade’ is stares of blank incomprehension; if I’m less lucky – which has happened quite often here in Britain – I get a full-in-the face denigration not just of my work but myself as a person, for the unacceptable sin of ‘thinking different’. Not far off the same with most of the dowsers, and the rest of the pointless, pathetically self-obsessed ‘alternative’ scene: it’s painfully clear that most want to cling onto their delusory newage just as long as they can, and have no wish or intention to face any form of reality. Which, in turn, is equally true of the IT industry – utterly lost in their own self-important delusions, wasting everyone’s time, money and everything else, selling dreams that they know damn well they can’t deliver. Same is true, in fact, of pretty much everything else I’ve looked at professionally over the past decade – just don’t get me started on the failings and outright fraud of the domestic-violence ‘industry’, for example…

And I must admit I’m utterly sick of it all. I’ve been struggling too long, too hard, in too many areas and contexts, trying to get anyone to think, to see how ludicrously stupid so many – almost all? – of the usual approaches and models and frameworks really are, and that we really must do better, really, really urgently…

But I have to accept it ain’t going nowhere. Pretty much no-one is interested in what I do or what I say; and certainly no-one here is willing to pay for it. So in practice I’m back at being the Outsider again: as far as this society and culture and milieu is concerned, it seems, I have no societal function, no purpose, no role to play, and no place anywhere within it, in pretty much any sense of the word. Hence, unsurprisingly, no support either. And the endless loneliness out here on the Outsider edge hurts like hell: it always has, always does.

Quite where that leaves me, right now, I don’t know. Somewhere not exactly pleasant, that’s clear. Some painful choices up ahead, that’s also clear.

So yeah, a bit dispirited at present.

Oh well.

Been working flat-out on yet another book-project, a collaboration with archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, with a working title of Disciplines of Dowsing. Reason for the rush is that we want it ready in time for the next annual conference of the British Society of Dowsers, in late September – which is something like five to six weeks away, and we still have a lot to do…

We describe it as being about dowsing, but in fact it applies right across the board to pretty much every type of subjective discipline – anything from dowsing to healing to archaeology to art and a heck of a lot more besides.

Main aim is to challenge the current frequently-abysmal standard of quality in dowsing and the various related disciplines. For example, my old field of earth-energies research is still not far off crippled by mangled misinterpretations of the supposed ‘Michael & Mary’ lines (Miller and Broadhurst – the original researchers – can’t be very pleased about that mangling, either), and perhaps even more by the dire influence of newage-laden nonsense such as ’spiritual dowsing’ and the like.

P’raps more to the point, not so much to challenge the abysmal quality, but to make some concrete suggestions as to what to do about it, by providing a consistent framework within which something resembling disciplined quality might be possible to achieve… (Yeah, I admit I’m being a bit cynical, but I’m feeling more than a bit jaded about the whole field, to be frank… :wrygrin: )

In the meantime, Liz and I have been coming up with some new ideas and radically new techniques to link between dowsing, archaeography and archaeology. More details on that when the book’s out and done, though.

Quick summary of contents, if you’re interested:

• Introduction: Background; Dowsing in ten minutes; A question of quality
• Disciplines: The disciplined dowser; The dowser as artist; The dowser as mystic; The dowser as scientist; The dowser as magician; The integrated dowser
• Seven ’sins’ of dubious discipline: The hype hubris; The Golden-Age game; The newage nuisance; The meaning mistake; The possession problem; The reality risk; Lost in the learning labyrinth; Cleansing the sins
• Practice: Fieldworker’s senses; Setup and fieldwork; Some worked examples

More later when we’re closer to publication, anyways.

Continuing the fixups from my mildly embarrassing blunder with e-book downloads on Tetradian Books – looks like I didn’t get it right that time either.

Looks like it may have been a case of Read The Fine Manual… oops. Definitely embarrassing.

So I dearly hope that this time, having read the proper instructions for the Drain Hole download-manager, and put in the proper embedded codes rather than an assumed URL, it might now actually work. Let me know, if you would?

Many thanks – and apologies, too.

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Addendum, 16 July: finally discovered that the read-access permissions were set to default to Administrator-only. Have now reset this to ‘Anyone’, so should now at last work – please please please? I’ve tested it in a whole bunch of different ways, and the only one that doesn’t seem to work, on some systems only, is direct (left-click) view in Internet Explorer. If in doubt, use ‘right click and save’.

Apologies again for the blunders – oh well.

Just discovered, courtesy of a much-appreciated comment from John Gøtze, that my e-book download-links in Tetradian Books weren’t working properly. Or rather, they were, but only for ‘right click and save’, not for simple click, which is what I’d written.

(I’m using a WordPress plug-in called Drain Hole to manage downloads – looks like ‘Black Hole’ might have been more accurate. Oh well, it’s fixed now, in text-form at least.)

Apologies to all who may have attempted to download prior to this. Try again – and again, do let me know if anything doesn’t work!

I’ve now published the next in my ‘Tetradian Enterprise Architecture’ series, SEMPER and SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness. Details on the Tetradian Books website – see here for the book-info, and here for the free-download PDF e-book.

It includes a full description of the Tetradian / SEMPER framework, the SCORE replacement for the classic SWOT strategic assessment technique, and both variants of the SEMPER metric / diagnostic – the simpler SEMPER-5 and the more detailed SEMPER-11.

SEMPER measures ‘ability to do work’ in the broadest sense – probably the key metric for whole-of-enterprise architecture, and for enhancing effectiveness at the whole-of-enterprise level.

I’ve also restructured SEMPER-5 slightly so that it ties in more closely with the whole-of-enterprise architecture framework that I used in Real Enterprise Architecture.

Yup, there’s been a lot of work gone into all of that. Share and enjoy, perhaps?

I’ve now published my sort-of film-script ‘Eureka!‘ in book-form – see the Tetradian Books website here for the book-info, and here for the free-download PDF e-book.

Set in the Australian 1850s goldfields (mostly), it’s best described as a comedy/satire about all the fuss and hype around the 150th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade (1854, hence 2004), with a few (well, more than a few…) digs at present-day Australia politics and society.

Pure vanity-publishing, I know – but I spent at least six months writing the script, and probably much the same on the follow-up, so it seems worthwhile to get something tangible out of all that work! Don’t worry, I don’t ever expect to sell any, but they should make good visiting-presents or some such.

Gotta have some fun somewhen, ain’t I?