Blog

24 Feb

What a Neat Idea

Posted February 24th, 2008 | View Comments

Derek Burress is a real estate blogger who I met at a recent flame war in honor of Greg Swann.

Hi Greg and Brian.  Hope all is well with you.  I apologize for my harsh words over the years.

Wow, that was easy.

Now On to the Neat Idea

The flame war itself was the usual secondary bully market non-sense  (Bluto Freddie Mac).  Some good came out of it, however, because I met Derek Burress.  Derek is a real estate blogger who’s given up his real estate blogging to write a novel.

What a neat idea.

I’d link to him if I could, but his site is down at the moment.  Well, what the heck, maybe it’ll be up by the time you read this.  DereckBurress.com.

Why This Is Cool

I have this book, Writing Fiction Step by Step, that I bought over a year ago.  I haven’t looked at it much, because being a broker keeps me busy, what with working on my own transactions and helping / supervising my agents with theirs.

Writing blog posts about the market in the Sacramento area really does pay the bills — albeit in a way that’s quite different from how the Real Estate Blogger A-List would have you believe.  About a year or two ago, it suddenly dawned on me that for the past few years, my true profession has been “professional writer”, even though the vehicle whereby my writing made me money was my occupation, which was real estate.

Self Improvement, Blog Improvement

Sometimes you reach these emotional crises where you discover that it’s time to start waiting for your life to begin and time to start living it.  Well, maybe you don’t reach those, but I certainly do.

I don’t want to be ungrateful to my hack market update writing — it’s paid the bills.  But I would like to improve this blog.  And I would also like to spend some time working on other writing projects that will pose me a different kind of challenge.

Does this mean the real estate business will suffer?  Not at all — well not from a client point of view, anyway.  Already my agents do a fabulous job with the clients who are good enough to reach us through this blog.  So the balancing act for me has always been how many clients do I personally help versus how many of those do I pay an agent to help. 

So improving the blog and doing other writing projects may mean a temporary pay cut for me (especially in this down market), but I expect the quality of service to remain high.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Hey look — I’ve made up a story already! 

One down.

  • http://www.reagentinct.com/blog Athol Kay

    I think the desire and ability to write are pretty much the #1 trait of a good blogger. I bet if you sratch the surface on everyone thats anyone that is real estate blogging you’ll find most have some sort of half cooked novel floating around inside their heads.

    Mine is a five part epic fantasy series and I also have 5-6 potential non-fiction books rough drafted.

    Maybe one day…. :-)

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-agents/ John Lockwood

    Holy cow. You’re way ahead of me. Go finish some of those, will you? You’ll enjoy it.

    I don’t know if I have a half cooked novel yet, but I have my first fully cooked story.

    I think I’m going to like this new job. It pays what real estate did when I first got into that, but minus the expense on gas money or getting my picture taken.

  • http://www.derekburress.com Derek

    Athol: I have five books (two novels) I have worked on here and there, but I’m having to “kill my darlings” as only one of those five seems to be working out.

    I have two other novel ideas I want to explore but there is one which for some odd reason, can’t seem to work its way out. The idea is to write about a wedding cake in the middle of the road, but other than the bride or groom getting pissed off, I can’t figure out how the wedding cake ended up there. The bride and groom situation is too obviously for a novel.

    The only situation that I have been able to come up with was that the bride discovered the marriage was arranged for financial reasons, and called off the wedding at the last minute.

    The other novel I have in mind is about a shoe found in a tobacco field that belonged to a Mexican immigrant who left due to a pregnant wife back home and ended up joining the revolution.

    Getting the book started is easy, but even following a well thought out outline, you can get half way and realize, this isn’t going to work. Therefore I have to “kill my darling.”

    With some of the books I had planned, I gave away part of my cookbook to the ladies group at my church and with the real estate stuff, since I no longer have much desire to finish that one, I am hoping to see if my friend Monica Villasenoir (author of the Best Damn Commercial Real Estate Book Ever Written) wants to finish it as a co-author and add it to her collection or have someone else to take it over.

blog comments powered by Disqus