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<br><div><br><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>From: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">"Dharma Blanket" <<a href="mailto:dharmablanket@gmail.com">dharmablanket@gmail.com</a>></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Date: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">June 9, 2008 12:56:50 PM PDT</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>To: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><a href="mailto:dharmablanket@gmail.com">dharmablanket@gmail.com</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Subject: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><b>Dharma Blanket Newsletter and Call for Submissions</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div> <h1 style="text-align: center; font-family: verdana,sans-serif;"><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="6">Howdy!</font></h1><div style="text-align: center; font-family: verdana,sans-serif;"><font size="4">Welcome to the Dharma Blanket!!!</font><br> </div><br style="font-family: verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: verdana,sans-serif;">It has been a while since i have sent out a newsletter, but so much is going on now i have to send out a heads up.<br><br>Mama Val and i are now starting a monster of a business that is going to cover a huge variety of areas of...well, everything, really! To start things off we have launched some websites from which we are basing our operations. These websites are <a href="http://mamavalsventures.com">mamavalsventures.com</a>, <a href="http://santacruzwhere.com">santacruzwhere.com</a>, and, we have <a href="http://dharmablanket.com">dharmablanket.com</a>! We have so much happening with these that my head is swimming with the big dogs...or something like that.<br> <br>At any rate, what i am sending now is a call for submissions for writings for immediate publication. All the info about this particular project is in the following copy of the call.<br><br>Mama and i hope this strikes your interest, but if it doesn't, there are many more projects we are rolling out that may. I (we) will keep you updated with all developments and opportunities, including an avenue for Santa Cruz artists and artisans (etc.) to sell their wares to the world, and several <i><b>real job opportunities</b></i>!!! (We hired a sales rep this morning!)<br> <br>Needless to say, i have a ton of work to do, so i am going to get to it.<br><br>Oh, yeah...before i go, i would like to say...<br><font size="4">"Check out A Course In Miracles, it is the BOMB!!!"<b><font size="2"><br> <br></font></b><font size="2">Love you all!<br>B.A.Swami Jesudas</font></font></span><br><h1 align="center">********************************************************************<br></h1><h1 align="center">Welcome to Mama Val's Ventures!</h1><p><i>SmartAss Spirituality,</i> serving the edification and entertainment needs of the spiritually disenfranchised.</p><p>SAS' first project is a line of 40-page eBooklets--hopefully 13 of them, and hopefully debuting 13 June--for the new Amazon Kindle and every other channel we can think of. (As to that 13: we're not superstitious, but we can't resist being cute.) So we're putting out this call to our fellow <i>Nouveaux Rishis</i>* for your words of wisdom. The time has come! If I was silly enough to doubt it, I was easily reassured by my fortune cookie at lunch the other day. It said: "Investigate new possibilities with friends. Now is the time!"</p><p>Lest you find 13 June an insane goal, Baba has been able to break down the time factor for you as follows. We will be accepting submissions continuously until further notice. </p><div> <br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><ul><li>Figuring on a 40-hour work week, if you can write just ONE word a minute you will have this project (~10,000 words) done in one month!I </li><li>If you can write 30 words every 5 minutes you will finish in just over 27 hours! </li><li>If you can write 50 words every 5 minutes you will be done in just over 16 hours! </li><li>OR, if you are insane like Mama, you can do 50 words every minute and you will complete the project in 3 1/3 hours! Or less! </li></ul> <h2>Guidelines for Manuscripts</h2> <ul><li>Tone is fresh, conversational, humorous, upbeat, positive, playful, as if you were talking to your best friend in your best mood, cracking jokes in a natural and spontaneous way. It doesn't need to be comedy per se. </li><li>Topics can include literally anything generally considered spiritual, but topics with a spiritual approach to practical matters are good, too...The Zen of [blank], but pls don't call it that, as the label has become so worn out. </li><li>We don't need you to agree with our "theology," or even know anything about it--it's essentially A Course in Miracles principles--or to be enlightened in any noticeable way, but we do need for your work to be useful in helping bring about a paradigm shift. (Humor, word plays, metaphor/allegory, poetry and the other arts, all route information through the right brain, making for a fuller, more substantial communication...and work around the left brain's knee-jerk tendency to intellectualize every experience.) </li><li>We particularly like works that are channeled by Spirit. If you feel as if "something's trying to come through," just put the pen on the paper or your fingers on the keys and let it flow.</li></ul><p>We are here to empower you and help you say what you have to say. You don't need to worry about spelling, grammar and such--we done learnt all that stuff real good, and can fix that durn thang for you right as rain. Potential "helpfulness" is the prime criterion for the material, which means us being able to package it for the marketplace. We admire virtuosity, but we still need to be able to take it to the streets.</p> <h2>Works in Process</h2> <ul><li>The Goddess' Guide for Guys: How to Make New Friends, Keep the Old, Get Laid More Often, and Succeed More Happily in Life in General </li><li>Sex and the Siddhis </li><li>Mama's Simple Sanskrit Lexicon </li><li>So You Want to Be an Atheist! </li><li>Are We There Yet?: A Guide to Enlightenment for the Bored and the Busy</li></ul> <h2>How to Submit</h2><p>Two ways:</p> <ol><li>Send a finished manuscript--I bet many of you already have something that would qualify. You can send MS Word, HTML, PDF, OpenOffice or even paste plain text into an email message...we an handle most popular formats. </li><li>Send us a *quick* query and we'll give you some quick feedback before you start writing.</li></ol><p>In any case, send it to <a href="mailto:%22submissions@mamavalsventures.com%22">submissions@mamavalsventures.com</a> or <a href="mailto:%22mama.val.promise@gmail.com%22">mama.val.promise@gmail.com.</a></p> <h2>What Happens Next</h2><p>If we like your manuscript, here's how we'll proceed:</p> <ol><li>Either we'll send you an offer to publish immediately, or outline a plan for bringing the material up to our standards. Our cut will be a percentage of the booklet's gross receipts, which in Amazon's case is 35% of online sales. MVV's percentage will be bigger or smaller depending on how much additional editing/coaching, production and promotional assistance we've extended. </li><li>You sign the contract and send it back. If we're really hip, we'll have figured out how to do all of that by email. If not, we'll have to resort to more traditional modalities. </li><li>You email us the manuscript within the agreed-upon timeframe. </li><li>We post it to Amazon within a couple of days to a couple of weeks, depending on the volume of submissions.</li></ol><p>The percentages may sound small, but when you're dealing with numbers the size of Amazon's----you can correctly conclude that even humble success in Amazon's context will yield a very large chunk of change.</p> <h2>What Happens After That</h2><p>So there's your book on Amazon. Anyone who searches on keywords associated with your book will find it. And if they know what's good for them, they'll buy it. :-)</p><p>Amazon pays monthly starting 2 months after publication, and will automatically deposit receipts into MVV's bank account early each month. MVV in turn will send proceeds to authors within a few days. Both MVV and Amazon are still working their kinks out.</p><p>And that's about it! We're about to test the Amazon Kindle technology with Baba's first book, <i>The Shocking Truth about Forgiveness</i> (not really an SAS title, but a great read nonetheless. Check it out on Amazon next-week-ish.</p> <h2>Contact Information</h2><p>Our new web site: <a href="http://mamavalsventures.com">mamavalsventures.com</a>. Don't bother going there quite yet, but by next week, it should be good to go with the basics. If you need to talk to us--myself or Baba--on the phone, please email ahead and schedule a time.</p> <h2>PASS IT ON</h2><p>Please distribute this Call for Submissions far and wide--as I said, we're casting a wide net. We will be doing a 2nd round of this email when we collect the rest of the addresses we're meaning to send to.</p><p>We look forward to working with you at this exciting time!</p><p>Warmly,</p><p>Mama Val Promise and Jesudas Baba </p><hr><p>*<i>Nouveaux Rishis</i> are today's new visionaries, showing up in a whole new way for a whole new planetary situation. The old rishis were the ancient Indian teachers who handed down the Vedas 5,000+ years ago.</p><p>The term is also a play on the French phrase nouveaux riches, designating people previously poor who've suddenly come into large quantities of money. On one hand, they don't know how to manage it very well and make all kinds of naive boo-boos in their spending that the financially mature wouldn't make. On the other hand, though, they bring a breath of fresh air and vitality to business-as-usual, and have been responsible for all kinds of innovations that probably never would've happened if they knew better.</p><p>Similarly, the nouveaux rishis among us have suddenly come into the wealth of spiritual traditions and practices that had been previously barred from them on account of membership, geography, technology and all the usual limitations of life-as-we-know-it. Many traditions have prophesied that at the "end times"--a whole 'nother big subject, obviously!--what had been hidden would be revealed, and that our sons and daughters would prophesy, our young men would see visions, and our old men would dream dreams, to paraphrase Acts 2:17.</p> <h2>How to Tell if You Might Be a Nouveau Rishi</h2> <ul><li>You have a persistent sense of the presence of the divine, "something more," "something beyond," regardless of not being able to find suitable rational explanations. </li><li>You have a very clear--though not necessarily definable!--inner sense of direction. </li><li>You have the Self-referentiality to go with it--the buck stops here! You don't need the experts to show you the way. </li><li>The Way shows you the Way. </li><li>You have a consistent compulsion to share what you know to help others. </li><li>You have a fascinating patchwork quilt of spiritual practices and folklore that you've picked up along the way. </li><li>People have a tendency to tell you their troubles and ask your advice.</li></ul><p><b>Mama Val's Ventures</b></p><p>Webmaster and information: Jesudas Baba</p><p><a href="mailto:%22baba@mamavalsventures.com%22">baba@mamavalsventures.com.</a></p><p><br></p></blockquote></div><br></body></html>