House for sale. Comes book-ready

We've finally bitten the bullet and placed our house on the market for some lucky family to buy. The complete listing can be found here. And here's the Realtor.com listing: Click here.

We've lived here 11 years, which is the longest Lisa and I have lived any place that wasn't our hometown. The kids barely remember living in Temple. Bug has never lived anywhere else. We really like this house, and have put a lot of effort into making it our own over the years. Here's my office, below. One of the first things I did when we moved in was close it in and install floor-to-ceiling book shelves. I really, really wanted to include a ladder on rails, but I just couldn't justify it in the limited space.

Astute readers may notice there aren't actually that many books on my library's shelves. That's because probably 90 percent of my collection is boxed up in storage. That was a lot of boxes. Double-stacked, and horizontally stacked on top, those shelves held a great number of books. I'm damn proud of those shelves--especially since my father couldn't understand why I just didn't get some cinder blocks and plywood and save all that effort. Our new house will have a new office, and I'll build a new set of book shelves, bigger and better, but I'm not looking forward to the considerable effort involved, and I'm not going to miss these any less. Heck, I miss my office already. I wrote "Prince Koindrindra Escapes" in here. "The Whale Below." "Being an Account of the Final Voyage of La Riaza: A Circumstance in Eight Parts." I edited fiction for RevolutionSF in here. I put together Voices of Vision. Heck, the massive undertaking that is my Chicken Ranch history book was conceived and executed entirely in here. I did a tremendous amount of writing in this room, even if my publication history doesn't reflect it. This office is going to be hard to replace.

We never expected to stay here forever. We always planned on moving to a more rural area with acreage we could develop (and the girls have been begging for horses for a decade now). Lisa on Location is going great guns, so much so that Lisa's already outgrown her studio in the Landmark. We need more space, and need a much larger studio space in particular so her business may continue to grow. We've already scouted several potential houses in our price range, and several are promising... if we're able to sell before someone else buys them out from under us.

The house has been on the market five days, and already we've had four showings, with another scheduled for tomorrow. When we were trying to sell the Temple house--which we loved, even though it was old and drafty--we would sometimes go an entire month without a single showing. So the initial interest is encouraging. Moving is entirely dependent on a sale, as our down payment is tied up in our home equity. This raises the interesting prospect of having to move out before we've closed on a new home. That's a scary thought. But as I say, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. If you know anyone in need of a New Braunfels home in easy commuting distance to San Antonio, San Marcos or even Austin, point them our direction.

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