Me in 2012: Writing Splendor’s sound-track, among other things.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been living for years now with my daily calendar system of staying focused on my goals. Some months I do better, some I do worse, but having a regular agenda has proved fruitful for me.

These are my daily goals:

• Work-out with free weights
• Walk with Cathleen and the dogs
• Write or update software
• Blog or write essays or Willie stories
• Practice the guitar

Software and writing came and went, strong and weak, in 2011, but the guitar got the benefit of end-of-day exhaustion almost every day: Mindless sitcoms on the TV, internet radio playing in my office, eye-candy on the iPad and “a Telecaster through a Vibralux turned up to ten.”

I love it, to say the truth, especially the sound of a solid-body electric amped up very loud but played very quietly. This is what made those Chicago blues gods such great underpants gnomes, and it’s the trick the British blues-rock gods missed when they doubled the tempo on all those old riffs and called it rock ‘n’ roll. I feel sorry for poor Cathleen, who by now has heard the I,IV,V blues played crudely in at least half of its infinite variations. But it works for me so well that sometimes I take pity on her and play through a headphone amp. This also promotes dancing — by me, that is, since I’m self-contained and free to move where I will.

But I’m wary of it, too, because the guitar gives me two benefits I must always find in my work: A creative outlet and something to do with my hands. I don’t want to give it up. To the contrary, I think I might take up the piano, as well, this year, as a looping and recording platform. My solution is to learn to write songs. I know I can do this, but by now it is possible to carry the song-writing process all the way through to a marketable demo — or even a release-ready recording. I have no desire to perform, but I would love to find an ambitious act to feed tunes to.

My other big blue-sky project for the year is to write a full exposition of the idea of Splendor, essentially an operating manual for the human ego. I did this once, in 1988, and, of course, everything I have written in the past 30 years touches on this theme. But I don’t think I have done the job properly yet — and I’m starting to think that time is running out. Not for humanity — reports of our doom are always exaggerated — but simply for myself.

And then there’s money work, of course. We started doing property management in 2011, and, allowing for some rough patches, that’s worked out pretty well. We’re at 15 houses now, still basically a pilot project. But we’ve gotten most of the kinks out of our systems, and the promise we make — happy tenants, happy landlords, happy neighbors — is being borne out by our results. We’ll build that business this year, along with some others.

Here are the businesses I want to grow this year:

• Property management
• High-end listings
• BloodhoundBlog Unchained
• Book, audio and video publishing
• Affiliate marketing
• Referral marketing

I’ve got other stuff cooking, too, but my focus for now is multiple streams of income. If I can scrape up the dough, I’d like to flip some homes this year, as well, and I always have big ideas for big money, when I get my hands on it.

I’ve been reading a lot of end-of-year stuff in the past few days, and most of it seems pretty dour. Here is John Hiatt (with Sonny Landreth blistering a Stratocaster) with an answer to all that:

Happy New Year! The time of your life is your sole capital. Make the most of it.