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In This Issue:
Feature Article: Taking
a moment.
Summer Beach Bash?
Helping Children get books
Support the Troops
Final thoughts by Dread Pirate
Recommended Resources
Contact the Editor
Taking a moment to let the mind rest and recover from life’s continued onslaught of stimuli might not be such a bad thing. I get up at 0500, (that’s 5 in the morning for you land lovers) and get home no earlier than 1900 (that 7 in the evening). The stupid long commute (on average three hours one way…car to train, train to bus, bus to work in the morning and reverse the order in the evening) combined with the normal trials and tribulations of the workday make for a very long day. And yes, the fact that I am one of the lowest paid individuals in my department also makes it all that much more difficult. Add to this 12 – 14 hour day to the inherent rough waters of life; I feel I navigate a very challenging course.
We can in fact do it all. If there is one thing my tour in the US Navy helped me understand with crystal clarity is that we do have the time. I was amazed to see how much I could get done in a single navy workday. My days were action packed from reveille to taps. The interesting thing was not only was I able to accomplish, at times what I believed to be impossible tasks, but I was able to integrate time for study, chow, leisure activities as well as an occasional nap. What I came to understand was that time management was the key to my personal success on all levels.
This understanding of taking time that would ordinarily be spent wasted (watching hours of situational comedies on the television comes to mind) and turning it into productive time has afforded me success after success. People wonder how I have managed to desktop publish ten books. Well, considering I don’t have cable…I have more time open on my schedule than they do. And I must be honest; being a single man also affords me more time than a family man. I hear the frustrated confessions of my married counterparts and know this to be true. Therefore, taking time to turn wasted time into productive and prosperous time is something I have tried to do as best I can.
I recall a time when I was standing up the Dpebooks.com family of websites (Dpebooks.com, dreadpirate.info & authormm.info) along with creating websites for several clients, desktop publishing my first few ebooks and working not one, but two jobs. I was getting about 2 –3 hours of shuteye a night, tops. While I was pushing myself to extremes, I knew I could do it. My experience in the military had taught me that I could quite literally go days without sleep and only experience a loss of productivity at the post 36-hour mark. Because I am knowledgeable about what I can do when forced I understand exactly how much I can do when I need too.
I have also learned that not all down time is wasted time. Yes, we can push ourselves to new and unprecedented heights but to do so continually, is futile. In the navy they called it liberty or shore leave. I can still recall the face of my division officer when he found me painting a space after we had arrived at out first port of call in six months (Haifa, Israel) and liberty call had been piped. I was exhausted, the dark circles under my young eyes told him so. We had just undergone a surprise inspection and taken more than a few hits on one of our more visible spaces. I had taken it upon myself to re-paint and re-stencil all the bulkheads. The job was to say the least, ambitious. We called him Zipper-head for some reason. Lieutenant Zipper-head looked at me and bluntly asked, “Dread Pirate! What the hell are you doing?” I stood, looked at the buckets of paint, the paint covered roller in my hand and pondered how this man ever became an officer. “I am repainting the space that failed, sir.” He looked at me like I was insane, “I can see that sailor!” It was times like these when I truly pondered why officers where always a little slower on the uptake than most enlisted. A Chief Petty Officer would have just said something brilliant like, “Dread you a damned idiot, hit the rack or hit the beach. That’s an order.” Nope, not the ever polite officer and gentleman; they liked to play fifty questions. “Yes, this is the space that failed for incorrect stenciling, but why are you repainting the entire space?” I was often amazed at the lack of knowledge Officers in the US Navy had regarding damage control regulations. I was tired and really wanted to get the impending interrogation over with so I dipped the roller in white paint and talked while I worked. “Sir, if a single bulkhead is marked incorrectly you can paint-over. In our case Parker just fucked-up the entire space and guessed at the numbers. They are all wrong. That means that we have to cover all the bulkheads, have engineering give us the proper numbers when the space is prepared for stenciling. That means it has to be completely repainted, otherwise the Chief Engineer will fail the space again.” Zipper looked at me like he always did. He gave me that look of how does this kid know all this? I painted he watched for a long moment. “So you are not going on liberty?” It amazed me how good the man was at stating the obvious. “No Sir, I have duty tomorrow so I figured I would knock this out over the next 48 hours so we don’t get hit again.” Just then Parker showed up. He was in my duty section and had just gone to get us some soft drinks and snacks (gedunk) to chow on until mid-rats (midnight meal). He was working as my Damage Control Assistant at the time and I recruited him to assist in the job since, after all, it was his mistake that got us pinged. Zipper-head looked at him and then back to me. “Dread, you have worked to many hours. You work damage control, flight deck, self defense force as well as below decks, I need you to take liberty.” The stupidity of officers still amazes me to this day, even if I tried to get off the quarterdeck I couldn’t. The Navy in its wisdom assigns each crewmember a liberty card with their duty section number on it. If your section has duty, you cannot leave the ship. My duty section was about to come on in less than five hours so they would not let me off the ship. I took a deep breath and took the easy way out, “Yes sir, I will get off this tub as soon as I can.” Zipper-head walked away. I continued to paint.
I eventually got to explore Haifa and most of Israel. It will be an adventure that I shall always treasure. Not only did I push myself to work, I also pushed myself when I played. Most sailors go ashore to sample the local libations in a local pub and hope to meet a girl. I went ashore to see the world, study its people and immerse myself in its culture. The finest restaurants, museums, cultural centers, and yes, even tourist traps were on my docket. Seeing the world while on a limited liberty schedule took some serious time management. I needed time to play and see the things I wanted to see as well as do what I wanted to do! That is how I was able to see, most of the US East Coast, St. Thomas, St. Croix, Nassau, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Israel, Lebanon, Granada, Germany, England, France, Norway, Cross the Artic Circle, and more in only four years. While I performed more work than I care to recall, I also played more than I can remember.
Take a moment to let your mind rest and recover from life’s continued onslaught of stimuli. You don’t have to travel to a foreign country. But you do have to acquire the vacation / liberty call mindset. Leave work behind for a while. Trust me when I tell you that if you work hard, you have to play hard. It is part of the balance of life. Kicking back and taking a well-deserved rest is not a bad thing, if anything, it is a great way to regain your energy, perspective and motivation!
I know there is still snow on the ground but it is never too early to think about this year’s Summer Beach Bash. Past years contests have included writing contests as well as photo contests all ending with great prize packages for the winners. I have to admit that I have not-so-willingly sent those first place prize packages off. Two years ago the first and second place winners claimed a hefty treasure chest! To date, if memory serves me correctly, I have had, at most, five treasure chest full of goodies for the winners. (I target three but hope for many more.)
Preparing for my Summer Beach Bash is no small task. First, I have to solicit sponsors that are willing to offer up some small bit of treasure in exchange for excellent exposure. Then starts the marketing of the contest on several (3) websites and that involves continued updates when new sponsors come aboard and new prizes and prize packages are added. While advertising is done via the World Wide Web via three primary websites (and also linked to by many readers) I also contact a large group of people via email listserves, chat boards and personal email. While the latter is getting more difficult with the growing number of interested participants, I try very hard to keep personally involved in the contest as much as possible. If you are interesting in participating in, or sponsoring the Summer Beach Bash contest make sure to email me as soon as possible.
If you are a writer and want to submit a story, you will need to get on the mailing list to get the rules and topic of this years writing contest. If you are a graphics artist and would like to make a banner for this years contest, please email me as soon as possible. If you would like to sponsor the contest, you can do so on many levels. Prizes can be goods or services that are provided via the web. Cash donations are accepted to offset the cost of shipping the prize packages to winners as well as help me purchase additional surprise items that always seem to end up in the prize packages. Further, I am open to almost any and all types of sponsorship. If it helps you and me…then we sail onward. Team DPe will begin working on winding up this year’s Summer Beach Bash as well as my Halloween Writing Contest in short order. Please feel free to contact us should you like to lend a hand.
On average, over 70,000 individuals from around the world visit the site each day to click the "Fund Books for Kids" button. To date, more than 55 million visitors have helped provide more than a million books to children who need them the most. *
Taking the time to take a single click a day can help a child receive a book that will open up a whole new cosmos for the child. Sister Melanie gave me my first book in grade school. My parents were not to hot on books and reading, so as a little rogue, I was not introduced to books until I entered school. Sister Mel handed me an old abused paperback. The cover was replaced by cardboard and the words The Hobbit were neatly written across the front. She said she thought I might like the book.
As an LD kid with dyslexia, reading was hell. But, I found myself entangled in a fictional world, with little people like me, battling evil monsters and winning! I read the work slowly. My vocabulary was minute and I spent most of the time with Uncle Dick (The Dictionary) looking up strange new and difficult words. The Hobbit was the beginning of my love of reading and ultimately my jump into the world of writing.
Reading is one of the most important things we must learn in order to survive. Please help a child today with just a click of your mouse!
Support the Troops...
As always First Mate and Mermaid Diva C is keeping the USA Troops Aide weblog up to date. We have added NEW names and addresses of deployed soldiers who would like nothing more than to get a note, letter, or carepackage from you. We give all the info you need to include the best pay to pack, ship as well as what items are the most needed. We have to date, sent over 1000 care packages to the troops. I have personally sent over 450 care packages overseas. Please get involved and take a moment and visit:
As you know I write under several pen names and write in more than a few genre’s. It is for this reason that I use this newsletter to brief everyone in a very broad fashion. Things however, over the past years, have slowed to a crawl for me. This is because of a wide variety of factors; health, energy, money and most of all, free time. I was promoted at work and the additional duties have kept me on my toes and moving in far more of an IT direction than I ever thought possible. Over the past six months I have spent a month and a half in classes. This is a huge change and one that gobbles up my free time completely. What little time I do have I try to spend working on keeping the DPebooks family of websites active and blogging. Regretfully I must report that I am not working on any significant projects at this time. Trust me when I tell you that this is not by choice! Life does get in the way of ones aspirations on a continual basis and I am no different than anyone else I am afraid. But this only helps me to better manage all of my resources. One of the things I realized long ago was that when we take account of exactly what we do, how much time it takes, how much of our resources it utilizes, we are provided with vital feedback that allows us to adjust our course and sail much closer to the line. The other major drift factor is that I have just purchased an iMac and am attempting to work on both the PC and Apple environments in order to get the job done. This will mean that I will slow down by default while climbing the steep part of the learning curve. Further, I am now also slightly handicapped while searching for web development software and word processing software (to include PDF conversion) for the Apple machine. All if this will take time, patience and cold hard cash. Thus, there will be a slowdown until I can get up to speed. While I am glad to have had the opportunity to move to an Apple machine, I am not sure it was very good for business. Wish me luck on my iMac journey.
Thanks for reading!
Dread
Recommended
Resources
www.dpebooks.com
www.dreadpirate.info
www.authormm.info
Dread's
Beachside Message Board.
Dread's/MMs
AD website
Contact the Editor:
WEB: www.dpebooks.com
Email: xdreadpiratex@yahoo.com
Snail Mail:
Dread Pirate
CMO
PO Box 1224
Flat Run, VA 22508 -1224
Copyright 2005 - 2010 DPebooks.com/Dread Pirate.
All Rights Reserved.