Writer’s Demand Avoidance; Or, Run Your Own Race

I recently discovered yet another psychiatric disorder. I call it “Writer’s Demand Avoidance,” the primary symptom of which is being unable to compose the usual type of writing which one is accustomed to, for a period of at least fourteen consecutive days. Upon trying to force oneself to work on a piece of writing, anger, anxiety, and writer’s block ensue, leading to greater frustration and feelings of Author Inadequacy.

The primary cause of this distressful disorder?

Deciding on a minimum daily word count, which minimum exceeds the prior minimum by at least 800 words and leads to resentment toward other daily tasks and hobbies because the increase word count also means decreased time available for non-writing activities.

I’m being facetious, and I know that deciding to stick to writing 3200 words per day this past mid-winter wasn’t the real reason for my novel writing shutdown for the past two months, but it didn’t help.

In the meantime, I worked on a self-help book. But before I started it, and while I was in between chapters of that book, whenever I tried to restart the fourth novel in my latest Christmas romance series, it just.

Wouldn’t.

Go.

Anywhere.

I had a similar trouble with the third book in the series, though I didn’t have in my head at the time to write more a day than my usual 2,000 words. So I was determined to write this final novel. If I could break through the demand avoidance with that one, I could do the same with this one.

I finished the self-help book, got a skeletal outline going for the romance novel… and threw the 3200 words per day idea out the window.

I’ve been steadily writing 2,000 words, and only 2,000 words, every day, even when I’ve felt like I could write more, for the over a week now. For the first time in a long time, writing fiction is fun. I’m not pressuring myself with a deadline. And, I have a lot of free time for chores, hobbies, and enjoying the outdoors.

I’m also finding that limiting my daily word count helps to keep the story momentum going. I don’t run out of steam.

Long story short? I believe pressuring myself with a high daily word count was causing novel writing burnout even though I was spacing the composition of said novels a good deal apart, as I’d promised I would do in this article. Why did I do it in the first place?, you might ask.

Because of having heard, over the past several years, other self-published fiction authors talk about how they whip out five thousand and more words per day. Without the help of AI, I might add.

I also might add that these authors usually don’t have any children, often are single, are younger than forty-five years old, and – here’s the clincher – if they don’t write that next book, they’ll have trouble paying the light bill.

I have no need to try to write a book a month. Or a book every two months. I write because the process fills a place in my soul, and makes me feel like I’m contributing something good to the world.

As long, that is, as I’m writing on my own terms, and not somebody else’s.

As I was reminded in an e-mail I received from Malory Ford, another Christian romance author, I need to run my own race, not somebody else’s.

Should I Purchase Property On Eagle’s Nest Ranch?

“Should I buy property on Eagle’s Nest Ranch in southeast Oklahoma?”

If you’re asking this question, you’re one of its few intelligent prospective land buyers. As someone who has been living in the area for over ten years, I have some thoughts for you that I hope will help you make your decision.

Whitetail Properties aren’t the conservationists they claim to be.

Eagle’s Nest Ranch is being developed and sold by the rural Real Estate company called Whitetail Properties. On their website, they claim to be conservationists. However, by the time they finish preparing their three housing developments, they will have clear-cut several hundred acres of forest from what used to be a beautiful, pristine mountainside. They have destroyed the homes of countless birds and the habitat of deer and other animal species. 

If you purchase a tract on one of their “ranches,” there will be few to no trees on your property, or separating your property from the others. The Powers That Be at Whitetail Properties are, in effect, attempting to build suburban subdivisions in the middle of a forest.

Cutting to the chase, Whitetail Properties is run by people of dubitable moral character who care much more about the money they can suck out of people than about nature and conservation. When my husband and I bought our property in 2011, we had to sign a contract agreeing, among other things, that we would not cut down more than twenty percent of the trees on our property. 

Given that the developer had divided the area into tracts that were no smaller than five acres, and that the people purchasing the properties wanted to live in the woods – which is as it should be for anyone buying property inside of a forest – most of the forest in our mountain development remains intact, despite the fact that well over half of the owners have built houses, even gardens, here. The developer who sold us the property where we live has more conservationism in his pinky finger than the entirety of the staff on Whitetail Properties, or the managers of Eagle’s Nest Ranch.

The Owner/Managers of Eagle's Nest Ranch is inconsiderate of their neighbors.

If you go to the Eagle’s Nest Ranch website, one of their bragging points is the roads they have built through the mountains (again, a lot of loss of forest and wildlife). The material to build those roads did not come out of thin air. They had to get it from somewhere.

You’d like to think that they went to a pre-existing quarry and bought gravel. You’d think wrong. What they did was to destroy over five acres of forest in order to harvest the shale underneath.

But not just any five acres. The forest they eliminated, the land which they turned into a moonscape, is in the direct view of the two non-Eagle’s Nest Ranch properties which butt up against ENR. The quarry is ugly, and in the future should the current owners of those properties try to sell, the quarry will make it more difficult and possibly lower the land value.

Oh, and did I tell you that they decided it would be clever to burn the trees they were killing right next to the lower non-ENR property, and that they ended up burning to death several trees on that neighboring property? They never offered compensation to the owners of that property to cover the loss. The owners would likely have to file a lawsuit to get any.

There is also concern among the low-income residents of Clayton, the town nearest Eagle’s Nest Ranch, that their property taxes will increase considerably thanks to Whitetail Properties. If that happens, many people might be displaced.

They charge exorbitant prices.

Whitetail Properties is known for overpricing properties to excess. One tract that is one and a half acres on Eagle’s Nest Ranch is priced at over $227,000. Even given the cost of bringing in utilities, this is way overpriced. The market value of mountain land in this area right now is around $20,000 per acre.

If you purchase from Whitetail Properties, you will be ripped off. And that’s before the ridiculous post-CoVid19 cost of building a moderately-sized cabin.

Speaking of market value…

The housing bubble has arrived twelve years late!

We were living in the Dallas area when the housing bubble burst happened back in the early 2000’s, and it missed Texas – and I think Oklahoma – completely.

I’m no economist, but it seems to have arrived here now. When we bought our southeast Oklahoma property in 2011, we paid $3800 an acre for a piece of the beautiful mountains. Now, you’re lucky if you can find anyone asking for under $20,000 an acre. While housing prices in Dallas haven’t gone up by five times since 2011, they have more than doubled.

Yes, some of this can be blamed on Biden’s acceleration of inflation. But not all of it.

Let me give you a hint about southeast Oklahoma land: it ain’t worth $20,000 an acre. You can’t grow food unless you spend a lot of money amending the soil, or buying a lot of bagged potting mix – and then most of what you might try to grow is likely to die of some sort of fungus. If you want land for hunting, well, how many deer are there going to be with developers creating small towns in the mountains? Besides, with the current cost of land being what it is, you’d save money staying where you are and buying deer meat for the rest of your life!

If you purchase a tract from Eagle’s Nest Ranch – or anywhere in southeast Oklahoma, really – then decide to sell in a few years, there’s a chance that you will lose money.

“But it’s beautiful country! The view is worth it!”

Trust me. If you’re thinking about leaving the city because you’re tired of seeing a brick wall every time you look out a window, you may eventually get tired of the forest view, too. Even if you wouldn’t, you need to decide if a “view” is really worth overpaying in a market that might be about to burst. You may be better off saving your money to go on more vacations.

Especially when you realize the truth of the next issue…

Southeast Oklahoma don’t got no shopping malls or Whole Foods.

Another boasting point on the Eagle’s Nest Ranch website is that the properties are “only” two and a half hours from either the north Dallas area or Tulsa. That’s two and a half hours to get to a decent department store. Two and a half hours to a Whole Foods. An entire day, and five hours sitting in a car, just to buy groceries or a new, quality dress.

“I don’t shop at Whole Foods. I’ll just go to the local grocery store.”

All right, then you can come to my house and tell me if they have stopped selling wilting lettuce, carrots that have begun to rot in the bag, and moldy grapes.

Yes, it’s that bad.

The closest place that sells decent groceries is either in Antlers or Wilburton, both nearly an hour’s drive from Eagle’s Nest Ranch. Walmart is about the same distance in the city of Mcalester, but take it from me, if you’re used to a chain as even as humble as a Tom Thumb or Kroger, Walmart produce and frozen foods won’t cut it.

Oh, and by the way, grocery delivery services don’t come this far out, and the nearest Azure Standard pickup is over an hour away, and run by a family who will try to give you religious tracts that tell you you’re not saved unless you’re following the laws in the Old Testament book of Leviticus.

McAlester does, thank heavens, have a Lowes, but if you love Target or prefer Home Depot, they are at least an hour and a half away.

Clayton has one beauty salon, a variety store that charges up to five times the market value for the items that they sell, and a hardware store whose tools aren’t always the best quality. If you want to eat out at a halfway decent place, again, we’re talking an hour and a half drive to Paris, Texas.

Don’t care about that? You say you’ll just order everything from Amazon and eat homemade meals? Fine, that’s what we do, too. But think about this: how long do you think those shale-based roads are going to last with UPS trucks going over them every day to deliver to everyone in your treeless mountain subdivision?

Besides, UPS won’t deliver handymen or A/C servicemen to your door. And when you finally find one who will come all the way out there, you may wait a week or more to get whatever repairs you need done, done. That goes for plumbers and any other contracting service, as well.

Speaking of UPS and roads…

The county won’t melt the ice and snow for you.

We usually have a decent sleet, ice, or snowstorm every winter. The higher up you live in the mountains, the colder it is, and the longer it takes for everything to melt – several days longer than it does in the DFW metroplex.

And the county isn’t going to give the suckers residents on Eagle’s Nest Ranch special treatment. When you live in these mountains, it’s possible to be stuck on your property for several days after a winter storm.

Secluded? Not so much.

The Eagle’s Nest Ranch website promises seclusion for its new owners. However, none of the tracts are much larger than two acres. You can only get so far away from your neighbor on two acres.

We live on five acres, yet we can see two of our neighbor’s homes from our house. That’s even with all of us having obeyed another one of the developer’s agreements on the sales contract, to build a house not closer than 100 feet to any boundary, and with having thick copses of trees between us. And I’m guessing Whitetail Properties isn’t making anyone agree to any such thing. You might build your house on what you believe to be the best site on your acreage, and your new neighbor could come along and build their house right across from yours.

Also, how “secluded” is a 48-tract development, with all the tracts being small and hitting up against each other, with no trees in sight? 

Here’s another gem the Whitetail Realtors won’t tell you about, even if they know about it: There is an ammunition dump just outside of McAlester, on the south side. Two to five times a month, they blow up ammunition underground. We can not only hear the explosions, but sometimes feel the tremors which the detonation causes. Eagle’s Nest Ranch is located a little closer to that reverberation than where me and my husband live.

The locals already don’t like you.

No one around here likes Whitetail Properties. Some still aren’t happy, ten years after the fact, that people like me and my husband bought mountain land, though we’ve done our best to maintain the natural environment. I can only imagine the hostility that owners of Eagle’s Nest Ranch properties are going to face by the Clayton, Oklahoma locals. They want their small town, rural community environment to stay that way, not turn into a suburb full of wealthy people who don’t care about preserving the land.

Then there are these other issues...

If you live in the DFW area and suffer from allergies, they'll be five times worse in southeast Oklahoma. Why? Two reasons. First, higher humidity. Second, trees. A lot of them. Assuming Whitetail Properties doesn't eventually cut them all down.

Lots of trees plus high humidity equals allergy symptoms for much of, if not most of, the year.

For post-menopausal women, it's even worse. 

Note the higher humidity I just mentioned. If you don't like the humidity during the summer in Dallas, you'll hate it in southeast Oklahoma.

And if you've never lived in the South before, and are thinking, "I don't have allergies! I'll be fine!", ask any Northern ex-pat and you'll discover that we ALL developed allergy problems after moving to the South. If you want to move to a warmer clime, try Tennessee or some other semi-southern state that reports low allergies.

The ball is in your court.

You now know that Whitetail Properties is not as ethical a company as they claim to be. You know that if you purchase a tract on Eagle’s Nest Ranch in southeast Oklahoma, you will be supporting the destruction of natural habitat, including the cruel death and displacement of innocent animals.

In addition, having to drive five hours round-trip to experience culture – concerts, orchestras, community theater – gets old fast.

You need to decide: will you take the moral high ground, or not? Do you really want to be a part of the systemic, ongoing bulldozing of nature and habitat, when you already live in a perfectly good house with all the amenities that you could ever want within easy reach?

Living in the country, even one with a view of mountain forests, is not nearly as romantic as the people running Whitetail Properties want you to believe it is.