abby « Robin Writes

Good grief. Realtors are nuts—apologies to those I know. I’ve seen so many listings with either no pictures, pictures of neighboring property, or artistic pictures which look pretty but tell you nothing. Also, if a realtor doesn’t give an address, it’s really flippin’ hard to find on Google or wherever.

And clients. Sheesh. We made an offer on that property I talked about last week, a verbal one; no sense in doing reams of paperwork if the seller isn’t interested. Sheesh. Yes, I said it again.

So here’s what happened:

We told our agent to make the offer at $1,000 per acre. I’m not stupid, I researched first, and what I came up with was that land in that area averaged $975 an acre. By the way, the asking price was $65,000, or $1,548.

It took 10 days for the seller to respond. Hello? Email? Whatever. She said it was too low to counter, that other properties were around $1,700 per acre, it was “cleared,” and besides, it was “beautiful.”

Yeah, so?

Realtors, you know the drill—people have attachments to their homes and land, they think it’s awesome, etc., etc. I clearly remember a house we looked at a few years ago that boasted “new carpet!” It was bright blue. Bright. Blue. Hideous, to probably everyone but the seller.

Well, this chick is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. “Beauty” has little to do with the value; the picturesque barn is a white elephant; “cleared” is not the same thing as two small tracts of pasture. And yes, the price is too high—it’s been on the market for six months. The property she thinks is comparable has usable outbuildings, or wells, or septic, etc.

Well, in the interests of buying a piece of property now, because we’re running behind schedule, we upped it to $50K with a formal offer. Guess what? We can’t do that until the listing agent re-ups it on the MLS. The listing expired. Go figure. The agent is a 20-something who appears to be working for Daddy. Fine, just do the damn job. And quit taking those artsy-fartsy pictures!

When I was little, like three, four years old, I decided I wanted to write books. I took tiny pieces of paper, Scotch-taped them together, and “wrote stories.” My grandma thought it was cute. When I was about eight years old, I saw a TV commercial for Gone With the Wind—it was coming to theaters and the pageantry caught my imagination, so I asked Grandma if we could go.

She said of course, since that’s pretty much what she always said if I asked for something, although I didn’t do it often. The only caveat was that I first had to read the book. All 1000-plus pages of it.

So I did. I’m sure there were many things I didn’t understand, because, if you haven’t read the book but only seen the movie, you’re missing out Scarlett’s other two children and a host of interesting characters. But I read that book, and I got to see the movie afterwards.

Over the next decade, my scribblings evolved a bit and I submitted short stories to a few magazines—collecting rejection slips, naturally—and I worked on school newspapers and took a summer journalism class. I also kept a diary for some time; a very 1970s thing to do, it seems.

About seven years or so ago, I started writing professionally. Like, you know, for pay—pretty exciting, even though the topics were often boring and mundane. But at least I brought in a few dollars here and there.

And by the time that market dried up, so to speak, I had eaten that fateful salsa late one night and had a dream about a twenty-something young woman kicking butt and taking names . . .

That was Abby, of course, and so her story began: REDUCED was born.