I didn’t want to do it. I’d been a residential real estate agent and knew all the reasons I shouldn’t sell my own house, but I forgot to consider the Mr. Bill aspect.

For Sale by Whom?

There’s a lot about selling a home that’s the same, whether you sell it yourself or engage an agent.  You have to get your house into shape. That means fixing all those little preventative maintenance items you’ve been postponing.  That means planting lots of seasonal color and getting the landscape into good shape.  That means getting your house clean enough for the “white glove” test and staging everything so that it looks ready for a magazine spread.

However, if you’re going to sell your home yourself there’s even more you have to do.

Learn the Market

Learning where your home fits into the marketplace is not for the untrained or the optimistic.  Knowing how to price your home is very important, but knowing how to market it is even more important.  Though Bill and I had spent several years as successful agents, I knew we couldn’t just depend on what we knew back then,  we had to get out there and look around.

We drove all over the DFW metroplex.  We picked up a million flyers, made a zillion calls, went to a trillion open houses, scheduled several thousand showings and wore out our computers looking at Zillow, the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and Realtor.com, to name a few sites.  Price was the least of our worries.  We needed to know what other agents were doing to market their houses.  We wanted to know what trends were up and coming, as well as those that were over the hill.  We’d go look at million dollar homes and then come home and look at ours with a critical eye.  Then we consulted agents to see what they thought about our home’s place on the market.

Sell, Sell, Sell  

Then we got busy.  My husband sweated out in the yard, while I sweated in the house.  When every blade of grass was perfect and the house was both smudge-free and dust-free, we started loading up boxes with all the clutter, so we’d be magazine ready.

When we  weren’t perfecting the house and the yard, we were setting up a unique website for our home, www.HomeOnTheCreek.com.  We didn’t settle for the pictures we took, we hired professional photographer, Jack DiMaio of Virtual Tours Dallas,  and got a virtual tour, just like real estate agents have for million dollar homes.  We didn’t settle for that red and white FSBO sign they sell at the home improvement store, we custom designed a suite of signs, both “For Sale” signs and “Open House” signs, to compliment our unique website with Signazon.com.

Knowing that you can have the best website in the world that no one ever sees, we spent a lot of money to direct buyers to our house.  To compliment our website, we signed up with ForSaleByOwner.com, Reator.com and Zillow.  We even put the house on Craig’s List.

Did It Sell?

After all that hard work, did we sell the house?  Well, you’ll just have to come back next week and find out.

TRAVEL HERE: HOW ADVERTISING SOLD US A CAR

Our family has a new addition.  A 2014 Mercedes Benz CLA.

The Sad Day

One night in October of 2012, someone rear-ended Bill’s Mercedes on Preston Road, just a couple of blocks from where we turn into our neighborhood.  It was a sad day.  Bill loved that car.

After the insurance company declared his car totaled we dabbled with several options.  Bill and I test drove scores of cars.  We  made a stab at being a one car family.  He used up all the free days of loaner car.  Eventually we bought a brand-new, beautiful Nissan Altima.

Once a Benz Driver, Always a Benz Driver

I thought the story was over.  I continued to drive my Volkswagen Psaat and Bill had the Nissan, but Bill wasn’t happy.  Bill was a Benz driver and he didn’t have a Benz.

Soon he started talking about some new car Mercedes Benz would start selling in September of 2013.  I couldn’t get too excited about a car you couldn’t even buy yet, but Mr. Bill was excited.  Over the next few months I heard about that car a lot. Then he saw a video for the car targeting European drivers  and it was all over!  Here you can watch it for yourself : http://youtu.be/btIyZ6hgElc

He put my Psaat on Craig’s List and started looking for bargains on the CLA, but he ran into a problem.  Remember those commercials where William Dafoe, as the devil, tries to get a guy to sell his soul for a Mercedes.  The guy’s all ready to sign, until he finds out the car is under $30K.  Well, everyone except Bill thought that was a great price point for a Mercedes.  Not Bill, he was looking for the discount – and he kept looking and looking and looking…

Then He Sold My Car 

Bill was having no luck finding the deal he wanted, but then he found someone who wanted to pay his price for my car.  I thought he was nuts when he demoted us back to one-car-family status, but as he pointed out, he was going to buy his car soon and for part of that time we’d be out of town and the other car would just sit in the garage.  Famous last words!

Then He Ordered His Car

Bill finally wrangled up a few small discounts for the CLA and waited until December 31st, his favorite day to buy a car.  The only problem was that he’d sort of miscalculated when we’d get the car.  Nothing was available and he’d have to wait months to get the car.  The man was obsessed.  He put some money down and ordered the car exactly the way he wanted it.

Then we waited…SIX MONTHS!  At first, it was supposed to be six weeks to a couple of months.  Then the whole country of China got in line ahead of Bill, because folks there were willing to pay more for the car than he was.  As the postponed delivery date drew near, there was a bomb threat at the plant in Hungary where Bill’s car was being built, so the plant closed down for a while.  Then Bill’s car was built and we had to wait for a shipping date.  Then the car was on it’s way, but it was on the ocean.  As you can tell, Bill was getting frequent updates on his vehicle.

Delivery Day

We went on vacation the week before Bill’s car was supposed to arrive in Dallas.  We were visiting family, friends and lovely attractions, but all Bill could talk about was his baby that would be there when he got home.  I’m actually surprised we actually went on the vacation, even though it had been planned long before his delivery date was set.

The night before he was supposed to pick up the car, Bill drove to the dealership to see if he could lay his eyes on his coming attraction, but it wasn’t visible.

It’s a Car

You can see from the photo above how happy Bill was to get his car.  I think it’s a beautiful car with some wonderful features, but it is still a car.  (I mean it’s not a Jaguar after all.)

Kudos go to Curt Wiley at Mercedes Benz of Plano, the salesman who nursed Bill through this ordeal.  We also appreciated Heidi Clements who showed us all the bells and whistles.  Bill particularly appreciated the attractive blonde and her demonstrations.

We had a little more waiting, though – the joy of visiting the finance department.  You know about the finance department.  Lucky us, they had a brand new paperless computer system and they were working out a few glitches before they could see us.

I have to admit, the new paperless system was cool.  The top of the guy’s desktop was some kind to touch monitor.  The documents would appear and you signed them with a funky electronic pen.  Finally, something I could appreciate – that and the Nissan Altima which is now mine – all mine.

TRAVEL HERE: WHAT HAPPENED TO DIANE SAWYER

I go away on vacation for a few days and the world falls apart. For one thing Yahoo Voices is closing down. I really enjoyed writing for them, but I’d only been doing it for a few months, so I’m going to live. More distressing was the news that Diane Sawyer would be leaving her spot on ABC World News.

Who Needs TV?

As I grew up, Walter Cronkite was always at our dinner table.  Dad kept a small portable TV in the corner and he’d watch it during dinner.  I can’t tell you how much I hated it.  This was the Sixties, so along with Walter we got the Vietnam War and Civil Rights.  Since we could only talk during the commercials, our meals had a pattern.  However, we did talk, so I had the opportunity to get my parent’s take on what was going on.

When I went away to college there were so many exciting things going on that I never took the time to watch TV.  Not that I was studying or doing anything else productive, but I was having a great time.  Over the next decade, I bounced from one living situation to another, but TV fell completely out of my schedule.

Then Came Bill

For most of my single life, I didn’t even own TV, by choice.  Then a boyfriend brought one over so he could watch it when he was at my place.  The boyfriend was ancient history by the time Bill came along and the TV was in my junk room.  After we’d been dating for a while, Bill and I would talk on the phone every night before I went to bed.  I usually called it a night about 10PM – so he’d be watching the news.  I swear you learn everything you need to know about someone before you marry them, you just don’t pay any attention.

For years I’d bring Bill coffee in the morning while he watched TV.  Finally, the TV and the coffee left the bedroom ( I don’t even remember how I pulled that off).  Coffee time is still sacred around here, but TV is not allowed.  However, that somehow transitioned into me watching the evening news.  We record it and watch it later in the evening, fast forwarding through the ads.

And Then There’s my AM Addiction

I used to spend a lot of my time in my car and I liked for it to be quiet inside.  In recent years I don’t drive as much, but on those mornings when I’d make the haul to East Dallas  (eventually it was daily) I got to listening to WBAP on FM so I could hear the traffic.  Then I’d listen to Sean Hannity as I drove home, once again, for the traffic, but also because he had some really funny people on.  Then from time to time I’d also hear Mark Levin, Ben Ferguson and some of the other conservative radio personalities.  I’d even listen to Rush Limbaugh, because it gave me something to chat with dad about.

Mom and Dad are gone, so I don’t drive to East Dallas anymore.  And WBAP went to some digital technology on FM that I don’t have in my car – so I listen to them on AM.  I’m rarely in the car and when I am, it’s just for a few minutes, but I hear enough to know that what is beamed out into TV Land every night is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  A lot of it is conjecture, politics and opinion.

For the record, I do not swallow conservative talk radio whole, any more than I do mainstream media.  What I try to do is take in opinions from both sides of the house and then arrive at my own conclusions.  I yell at the radio for being ridiculous as often as I get in trouble for talking back to Diane and the ABC correspondents.

Bill teases me about my AM addiction and accuses me of being some sort of radical conservative. I give it back to him, accusing him of slurping up the liberal agenda without even being aware of it.  Maybe that’s why we fast forward through the ads – so we won’t have to talk about it.

So Who Will We Watch 

David Muir is an OK kind of guy, but the “Brad Pitt of News” as the article from Market Watch suggests?  I don’t think so!  I prefer George Stephanopoulos and I’d much rather hear international news from Christiane Amanpour than Martha Raddatz, but Christiane is over on CNN now.  I will not be watching Brian Williams and I haven’t visited CBS since Katie Couric.  Even Bill realized Katie was much further left than he was.

So we’ll be shopping around between now and September.  We’ll check out Fox and CNN and all the rest, trying to find ourselves another Diane, but I’m actually sort of pessimistic about the chances of that.  I’m going to miss Diane.

HEADING TO HEATH: GETTING TO KNOW OUR ARCHITECT

Have you ever gotten it wrong with your first impressions? Well, that’s what happened to us at the architect’s office.

The Heinz Ketchup Syndrome – Anticipation!

Last week I mentioned we were somewhat anxious about meeting with the architect for the first time.  Well, that was an understatement.  We had so completely awful-ized the possibilities awaiting us that Bill hadn’t even been able to sleep the night before.  Bill’s anxiety spilled over onto me, making me hyper-sensitive to every twitch of his eyebrow.  That poor architect didn’t have a chance.

Add to it that the architect’s a rather quiet person trying to deal with the Lucy and Desi of the home-building set (Bill and I) and it was all over.  If our builder hadn’t pointed us in that direction, we would have been out of that office in just a few minutes – and that would have been a huge mistake.

The First Set of Plans

“You better come here.”  It was a Friday afternoon just about quitting time.  Bill was upstairs in his office and had called down to get me up there.  When Bill calls me into his office, I never know whether I’m going to get to see the latest picture of our darling grandnephew or hear the minutia of options trading.  This time it was neither one – the architect had emailed us the first set of plans.

I confess, we’d set the bar pretty low.  That first meeting had been a little rough and then there had been a mis-clicked email.  Bill was actually expecting to fire these guys and moving on.  Boy, had we gotten it wrong!

Our Dream Come True

We were like a couple finding our own features in the face of our first child.  “Oh look, Bill, there’s your courtyard.”  “And Jane, look at the size of that pantry.”  We spent the evening and most of the next day poring over the plans with great joy.

All that preparation and research wed’ done did not go to waste.  They got it all and they got it right the first time.  Have we tweaked it since then?  Sure we have! Add arches here.  Could we have a balcony here?  Shave off a little footage here.  Can that ceiling be a little higher?  But if you come to see us some day in our Heath house, you’re going to virtually walk into the architect’s original plan.

Let Me Introduce You

So now that we’ve gotten that awkward business of our first date out of the way, let me introduce you to our architects, Mershawn Architecture and Construction.  Since our second date, we’ve been in constant contact with them and have even finished the elevations.  They’re gorgeous and I’ll tell you about them soon.

But I promised I’d tell you about selling the house.  I was just so excited about the plans that I got distracted.  Head back next week and I’ll tell you our  For Sale By Owner Experience.

TRAVEL HERE: THE OOPS FACTOR

So, what’s  your home improvement shopping spot?  Lowe’s? Home Depot? Walmart?  You know what’s funny?  I remember when we used to just call them hardware stores.

Handy Dan’s

The first Home Improvement Store I knew about was Handy Dan’s.  We had one on Garland Road, over in East Dallas.  The place was a wonder to me.  Wikipedia says the founders of Home Depot were fired from Handy Dan’s.  Talk about an error in judgement!

I can tell you this though.  Home improvement has improved a lot since old Handy Dan’s.  It really was just a glorified hardware store.  Home improvement stores have retained a lot of that warehouse-ish look, but they’ve greatly expanded the scope of items carried.

Lowe’s or Home Depot?

This family prefers Lowe’s and you want to know why?  We hate self-serve check-outs.  It’s like the darned things know we’re coming.  Fifty people could have just gone through the self-serve without a hiccup, but if we walk up, the whole system breaks down.

We do occasionally darken the Home Depot doors when Lowe’s doesn’t have what we want, but if Bill gets up to the front and there’s no one there to check us out, he’s been known to lay down whatever he was going to buy and try again later.  If you know someone at Home Depot you might tell them.  (Lowe’s also lets us bring our doggie to shop with us and Home Depot doesn’t!)

Put That in Your House Beautiful

Back when we were shopping at Handy Dan, most do-it-yourself-ers depended on the written word.  There were all kinds of hardback how-to books at Handy Dan, but most of us learned how-to in magazines.  I know Better Homes and Gardens and Southern Living were staples on Mom’s coffee table.  When it came time to redecorate, she’d have several magazines folded back to particular pages and we’d spend our time haunting wallpaper stores, furniture stores and such to replicate the look in our own home.

Nowadays, we just turn on HGTV and soak in the home improvement.  You don’t just get steps one, two and three.  You get to watch the whole process from design to reveal.

The Ooops Factor

Still, trying those D-I-Y steps at home isn’t quite as simple as they make it on TV.  We’re constantly running into situations that TV has no answer for.  You can have all the right tools, but a break down in communication can put a real dent in your project.  Sort of like this:

How It Looks on TV

Wife:  I think we should do “X” home repair.

Husband: I agree, let’s make a list of what we need to complete the job and then go to the big box store.  By next weekend we should be ready.

Then together they make preparations to do whatever home-repair needs to happen, embrace the job together, and then stand back to admire their handiwork.

How It Looks at Our House

Me: Honey, what are you doing?

Mr. Metrosexual:  I’m touching up the paint on the ceiling.

Me:  Shouldn’t you use a scaffold or something.  That ladder doesn’t seem very stable on the stairs. And what about covering the furniture?

Mr. Metrosexual:  I’m just touching up a few spots.  I’ll be through in a minute.

That’s when the gallon of paint dove off the ladder, spilling all over a leather chair and our mauve carpet.  The room smelled like turpentine for years.

OR

Mr. Metrosexual:  Sweetheart, have you seen those black gaskets I set on the counter?

Me: Gaskets?

Mr. Metrosexual: Yes, they came off the air conditioner.

Me: Is it broken?

Mr. Metrosexual:  No, I was just checking something out.

Me: Well, I don’t think I’ve seen any gaskets today.

Mr. Metrosexual:   I laid them there a couple of months ago.

Me:  A month or so ago?

Mr. Metrosexual:  I’ve told you not to move my stuff around.

After the ensuing argument and a dose of repair bills, I don’t move parts on the counter anymore – even if that means they lay there for months on end.

OR

Me: Why are we stopping at the big box store?

Mr. Metrosexual:  I need to pick up a bulb for the outdoor lights.  Come on in with me.  It won’t take long.

A couple of hours and several hundred dollars later we’re back at home with supplies  for four different odd jobs I didn’t even know we were considering, but no parts for the outdoor lights.  That’s OK, because, over the next week or so, we’ll be back returning or exchanging most of the things we bought.

So What’s a Girl to Do?

This girl just shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders.  Stacked up to the competition, nobody beats Mr. Metrosexual in all the categories that matter.  Obviously, home repairs ….Oooops, I’ve got to run.  Mr. Metrosexual has climbed up on the roof with his air compressor and I have no idea why.

(The bulk of this article first appeared on Yahoo Voices in 2014.)

HEADING TO HEATH: SO HOW MUCH IS THIS GOING TO COST?

When you’re building a home, there’s what you want and then there’s what you can afford. We fell in love with the architect’s plans, but could we afford to build the house?

Hello Mike

So I’ve told you that we really like our developer, Rob Whittle of Whittle Development Company.  Well, one of the things we like about him is that his business is a family affair.  (Not in the sense that he finds desks for all his unemployed relatives – we’ve all known concerns like that.)  Rob runs a top notch business  and his ethics and vision seem to run in the family.  I won’t introduce you to everyone, but I do want you to meet Mike, Rob’s brother and the guy in charge of construction for Whittle and Johnson Custom Homes, the construction arm of the development company.

Here’s the Bad News

Poor Mike.  Our first encounter with him was a list of up-charges.  We’d sent the interior plans to Rob and Rob gave them to Mike to see if what we’d planned fit the budget.  One look at the plans and Mike knew we weren’t very well acquainted with the word “standard”.  I had to scrape Bill off the wall when he first looked at the list.

If our taste isn’t standard, well then I’d venture to guess that our modus operendi is a little out of the ordinary.  When most folks discover they’ve planned more than they can afford, they just start cutting things out of their plans.  Not Bill.  He hit the internet and started hammering the phones.  By the time we met with Mike, Bill felt like he’d whittled (pun intended) the upcharges down to something we could swallow.

Here’s the Good News

I’ll confess I was more than a little anxious about meeting Mike.  When we built the home in California, our relationship with the builder wasn’t the most pleasant part of the experience.  It didn’t help that his wife walked out on him about the time we broke ground, but the guy also saw everything that Bill did as interference, not as input from the customer.  I hoped Rob’s construction manager was made out of a different piece of cloth.

WOW – we got a lot more than I’d been hoping for.  Mike’s a soft spoken sort, but he warmed up to Bill right away.  With a list of the up charges in hand, Bill and Mike went after it.

In the Beginning, The List Was Ahead

We started with the first thing – humongous dollars for roof pitch.  Roof pitch?  Who pays extra for roof pitch?  Well, come to find out we were going to.  Seems Mershawn was costing us a little with the way they’d drawn the roof, but a call to them revealed that less pitch would mean higher walls, more bricks, more weight, more foundation etc. etc. etc.  In the long run we were saving money with our high pitched roof.  So we decided we could live with the first upcharge.  It was actually a money-saving feature.

Next was the courtyard.  We’d thought we were saving money with a brick-walled courtyard.  Come to find out,  Bill did some research and found out brick cost as much as balustrades.  We like balustrades better than brick walls, and the courtyard was a non-negotiable, so the upcharge stayed, but we were trading up to what we wanted instead of what we thought we could afford.

But it was beginning to look like that upcharge list was going to get the best of our budget.  Could we build the house of our dreams and still be able to eat?

And Suddenly Bill Took the Lead

As Bill and Mike discussed the roof pitch and the courtyard, the atmosphere in the room changed.  Mike realized he was talking to someone who actually understood the costs associated with building a home.  Here was a homeowner who wasn’t going to gut all the best features of the home so they could afford it.  A partnership was in the making.

The rest of the  discussion became a share-fest of vendors and practices.  They found go-arounds, shortcuts and changes that would give us the effect we wanted while still lowering the upcharges.  Bill was able to turn Mike on to some vendors that will very likely earn a permanent place on Mike’s vendor list.

When we were through we knew the price was creeping up, but we’d also managed to economize on some things which kept us if not within budget, at least on the same planet.

So while all this was going on, we were trying to sell our house.  I’ll tell you about that next week.

TRAVEL HERE: DFW WRITER’S CONFERENCE The DFW Writers’ Conference has a lot more than great classes.  There are luncheons, networking and of course, The Gong Show. The Rest of the Story The evening before the conference, after my first vounteering stint, I attended a little soiree for members of DFWWW and the VIP’s. I didn’t have my big-girl-networking-panties on yet, so I didn’t get much networking done, but I was better at it by the time the conference was over. I missed the Opening Remarks the next morning, because I was still volunteering out in the foyer. That meant I also missed the first hour of classes. At ten I tried to get into Chantelle Ozman’s “Quick Pitch” class, but it was full.  I’d met her the night before and wanted to hear what she had to say about pitches.  Too bad for me. After the classes were over, I walked over to Abuelo’s to have some dinner. I was at a table alone when Nan Amir recognized me as a conference attendee – like because I had on the badge. We, of course, started talking about the conference and I got the equivalent of a free consultation by a very savvy writing coach. Though it was not on the agenda, it was by far one of the most valuable sessions I attended at the conference. To supplement what I learned, I later picked up two of her books, How to Blog a Book and The Author Training Manual. I’m looking forward to reading them.  If she can impart so much information over dinner, I can only imagine what kind of goodies are in the books. After dinner, we returned to the conference cent for the now-famous Gong Show. That’s when a group of editors with gongs listen to query letters being read anonymouslyand bang their gong at the point they’d hit the reject button. Here’s my notes: What they didn’t like: • too stylized • laughing for all the wrong reasons • first person • cliche “man becomes monster” • too many ghosts, demoness, heaven & angels • magical objects or artifacts • toddler with an uzzi • boading school, “The One”, expected direction • mermaids • too much in the soup • far fetched plot motivation • oversell • build-up of phrases, conversational • cliches Things they did like: • the concept of “Watchers” in a YA dystopian future • Art Pirates • Paranomal Volleyball Team • Diversity, if done right Lunch on Sunday was a Networking Lunch where the writers were supposed to select a table based on our genre and agents were supposed to come by and visit. There’s that old genre thing again. There was no general or commercial fiction table. I got as close as I could by selecting women’s fiction, but for most of the time, all we had was an agent who’d already rejected me. I didn’t win a door prize either. Not my favorite meal. Then there were the vendors.  I felt good buying a cool quilted shoulder bag from Rapha House, because they fight sex traffiking.  I bought a cover for small legal pads from a vendor who uses fabrics woven in jungles of Guatemala by natives my husband helped by building wood stoves.  That vendor didn’t have marketing materials and I forgot to ask who she was.  My friend Tui Snider was selling her travel guide, Unexpected Texas – a book I love.  Then I found two other books that I ate up like candy.  One was I Once Knew Vincent by Michelle Renee.  The other was Heather Webb’s Becoming Josephine, which I’ve already mentioned. And now, I’ve probably told you more than you were interested in the DFW Writer’s Conference – unless you’re a writer.  Next week, I’ll begin a series on a my latest trip to California.  You’ll want to read about it!

TRAVEL HERE: FAMILY VACATIONS TO DALLAS TX

Dallas is a great place to live and there’s lots of things to do, but it used to be where my family headed for our vacations.

Texas, My Texas

About a month ago, I shared a couple of food-related stories with you, which began on a vacation, but ended up right here in Big D.  For most of my childhood there was no mystery attached to where we were going.  We would always come home and home was Texas.  It’s just that Dad’s job wasn’t in Texas.

Dad finally got transferred to Dallas and we finally got to live here. Now the funny thing about moving here was that suddenly we had the opportunity to go other places for our vacations, but wherever we went, we went by car.  Both my parents worked retail, so airline tickets weren’t an option.  Not that this felt like a restriction.  Many families thought any kind of travel was out of bounds, so the fact that we took a family vacation every year put us in the privileged category.

On the Road Again

A subject I revisit often is that modern technology is robbing us of irreplaceable experiences.  The family road trip has been transformed forever. I loved road trips.  Sure, it was fun to stay in hotels, eat meals in restaurants and see new things, but what I liked best was that  I suddenly had unlimited access to my parents. Dad didn’t go to work.  Mom didn’t send me off to school or suggest I go run some of my energy off outside.  I had both of them for days on end.

I could talk to them about anything I wanted to and they’d tell me great stories. I’ve heard people complain about how boring their parents were and maybe I’m some kind of nerd for admitting this, but I thought my parents were way cool.  They talked to me about interesting things.  On road trips we’d discuss history, politics, science, religion, geography, psychology, etc. and they didn’t talk down to me.

They talked about real things and expected me to hold up my end of the conversation.  I don’t think that’s happening on family vacations this day and time.

The Background Noise

And while we discussed the issues of the day, AM radio was playing in the background.  We didn’t have tapes, CDs or satellite radio – and forget video players or MP3’s.  Heck, we didn’t even have FM.  Radio was just radio.  Those were the good old days.

HEADING TO HEATH: MEETING OUR ARCHITECT

Confession – after all that hard work, our first meeting at the architect was sort of anticlimactic.

What We Expected

Bill and I were a tad bit nervous about going to the architect.  It wasn’t our first rodeo.  When we built the California house, we’d had to fire the first architect and the first builder.  We adored the architect that actually designed our home, but we couldn’t say the same about the builder.  Now we were doing the build thing again.  This time we love our builder, but we were anxious about the architect.

So, after weeks of research, we expected several things.  One was that the architect would be impressed by our efforts.  Another was that he’d love our taste and be excited by our project.  That’s not exactly what we got.

What We Found

Let’s face it.  There are very creative, flamboyant architects out there, but most of them are not.  It’s a very computer nerd/accountant sort of thing.  Clients see the beauty of a circular staircase.  Architects see materials and geometry.  Our architect turned out to be quite dry – and that’s putting it mildly.

Instead of being impressed, the architect was almost scornful.  He suggested we wanted to cram a 10,000 square foot house into our 3,000 square foot plans.  That wasn’t fair.  The pictures we’d sent him were to let him know the spirit of the house we wanted, not its dimensions.

The tension in the room could have been cut with a knife and chatterbox that I am, I jumped into the middle of things and made them worse.  When we left, Bill was barely speaking to me.

Two Weeks Later

In spite of our concerns, we decided to trust our builder and give the architect the benefit of the doubt.  On pins and needles we waited for the first set of plans.  The architect had said we’d need to wait two weeks at the most.  About three days before that time was up, at Bill’s insistence, I sent an email.  Nothing happened.  Maybe this guy decided he didn’t like us and wasn’t going to give us the chance to fire him.

A few days later Bill called the builder to complain, because we hadn’t heard anything, but it had all been a case of mis-clicking.  The architect replied to the builder instead of to me and he’d asked for a couple more days.  It was a very human sort of thing to do, but given our already pent up anxiety, it had almost been the straw that broke the camels back.

The Plans Arrive

Then suddenly the plans were in Bill’s in box.  Ah, the wonders of the digital world.  No drive to the architect’s office was necessary.  Bill opened the plans with trepidation.  Were they any good?  Come back next week and find out.

TRAVEL HERE: DFW WRITER’S CONFERENCE

There’s so much to the DFW Writers’ Conference I could probably write twice as many posts about it as I already have, but here’s the last of my classes.

Cross Genre with Jonathon Maberry

Jonathon Maberry was the Keynote speaker of the event and he taught a few seminars.  Lots of folks seemed thrilled to death by his willingness to come, but I have to confess, I’d never read anything by him.  I felt a little less guilty about that when I discovered he was a horror/thriller/suspense guy.  That’s not a genre I’ve done much exploration in.  However, when I found out he knew Ray Bradbury, I did get very impressed.  Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine are two of my favorite books.

However, Maberry quickly won my heart when he said genre is a construct of marketing people.  He said our goal was to get in the Fiction and Literature department.  He’s absolutely right, but the marketing people have been very successful, so the first thing everyone wants to know is what genre I write.  He also said that you can’s take risks (and the marketing people can’t take risks on you) if you don’t write well.  He charged us to keep studying the craft.  He said a whole lot more, but that captures the gist of it.

Since we’re talking about the Keynote speaker, let me tell you about his address, which was quite interesting.  He gave a run down of his early life and then his introduction into writing, which included Ray Bradbury – lucky guy.  What he learned from Bradbry was that the greatest joy of successful writing was the success you could help others have.  So that’s how Maberry has tried to live his writing career.  I laughed at some of the things he did to put food on the table while he worked his way to becoming a famous author.  Writing instructions for seed packets was one of them.  Now he writes whatever he wants and people line up to buy it.  You go, Jonathon!

Bookcovers with Russell C. Conner

I went to DFWcon with the agenda of finding everything I could about self-publishing, but I hadn’t been there long, when I figured out that there was a reason I’d resisted self-publishing up until now and that I really didn’t want to do it that way.  Still, at ten o’clock on Sunday morning, Bookcovers looked pretty interesting – and it was.  Russell, an independent author and publisher showed us the evolution of his self-pubbed bookcovers.  I did get some information that was pertinent, however.  KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID.  That little smaller than a postage stamp icon isn’t going to convey much unless the artwork is very clean.  I didn’t stay for the photography part of the seminar, I had other places to be.

One more post and I think we’ll have this conference wrapped up.