What a Neat Idea
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.
