Real Estate Porn - the Friday Edition

I'm back! Well briefly. I still have two chapters to write and edit before I'm finished with the revisions on my YA. It seems like it's taken forever, but I'm really pleased with the way the book is turning out. The ending may need to be tightened up a little, but I'm clocking in at 75,000 words and 265 pages, which is ten pages less than my last YA. So I'm slowly learning to write tighter and tighter.

When I'm done, I'm sending the book off to my trusty readers and the manuscript critique service that I use to peruse the book before I send it off to the 2 agents that have requested the full. Yes, I did say two! I had another agent request this week, which sort off set the rejection that I got from another agent who was very complimentary and wants to work with my, but is not really interested in doing YA at this moment. She's looking more for women's fiction and romance, which I have. So I may just brush off one of my women's fiction hybrids at some point and shoot it off to her while I'm still doing the YA thang.

The goal of course is to have an agent who can do both. In the meantime, a writer that I know has said that I can use her name to query an editor at Hyperion books, so I'm definitely going to do that next week. Also, I want to go back and finish writing the novella that I hope to enter Kensington Brava's Novella line.

But back to the title of this post. I went to an opening of a brand new condominium development in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For anyone who doesn't really know New York very well, Williamsburg is like the first stop on the L train. It's been an up and coming neighborhood for the past ten years, but now developers are really swooping and building new developments. Probably because they've been priced out of developing in Manhattan. The neighborhood used to be very blue collar Polish and Russian immigrants. Then came the artists and actors looking for cheap rents. And now the yuppies.

I have to give the developers credit so far, all the new buildings that I saw where relatively consistent with the rest of the neighborhood. No really tall buildings. I think the tallest one I saw had ten stories.

This development is called Ikon, and you would have thought that rock stars and movie stars were driving in, because they actually had a red carpet! We all had to sign a waiver before we could go up that we wouldn't sue the developers if we say, fell through a hole in the floor or the elevator crashed. Up on the top floor was where the party was, with a free open bar and a specialty drink, the Pomtini, which is still the rage here in New York.

Downstairs was the model apartment, a two bedroom, all the mod cons, priced at least $800,000. I thought it was very small, and I'm not fond of the open living/kitchen/dining room thing. Basically it was three rooms since the kitchen couldn't really count as a room. The bathrooms were nice, all brick exposed walls etc. You could also, for an added fee of course, get this video service whereby you could control the climate, the lights, the DVD player, order food etc. all from this video screen on the wall in the kitchen.

It was interesting, but I'm not sure it's for me. However, I did enjoy the free drinks and snacks before I went home to watch Ugly Betty and Grey's Anatomy.

Thanks for reading,

EKM