Carmel Valley, CA

Spring is coming. I love this time of year. I feel like a black bear that's emerging from a few months of hibernation. I'm ready for some warm weather, sunny days, and lots of outdoor action.

I suppose Springtime is God's way of saying, "Okay, enough's enough. Time to bring you back to life." Although Winter is leaving, I'm not sure it's actually ever arrived here. One of the perks of living on the Monterey Peninsula is the year-round climate. Winters are more about rain than anything else here. And since California is suffering the worst drought in its history, the rain is welcome.

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This afternoon I'm attending a novel-writing seminar hosted by the Carmel Public Library. Local authors will be speaking about writing novels and the publishing industry. While the economy is hurting most sectors, including the book market, books and the publishing industry or still strong.

I'm a regular reader of the blog "The Rejector", written by an assistant in a literary agency. He (or she, probably she) recently wrote:

"Despite the corporate doom-and-gloom, publishing is actually a fairly stable industry in that people always want/need books...not all publishing companies are doing badly. Yes, I don't know an editor who isn't under a little extra stress (or a lot of extra stress because half her department was cut and merged with another imprint), but most companies are in the black or near the black, and the ones doing well are being tight-lipped about it, hoping no one will figure out their secret. (Hint! It's probably cheating the authors with low advances and bottom-level royalties!)"

I really don't think the economy is as bad as the press makes it out to be. People are still spending money. Yes, there are layoffs and the job-market is flooded with people looking for work. But why? Is it the recent real estate crisis? The world-wide recession? The depressed markets? When it's all said and done, it comes down to consumer confidence. If we keep hearing how bad things are, then a self-fulfilling prophecy takes hold and confidence drops.

Yes, the economic climate is bad. But I have confidence that it will rebound and we'll move ahead. I tend to see us going through a market correction. The real estate market was living on borrowed time, and it had to come to end.

I was a real estate broker in the late 1990s and we were saying at that time that banks were nuts for lending money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back. I attended a meeting in 2000 that warned us about this disaster. We were told it was coming, a banking collapse brought on my bad loans, probably by 2010. Sure enough, here we are. But as a real estate broker making lots of money at the time I joined my colleagues and ignored the gloomy forecasts. "We'll worry about the mess when it comes" was the prevailing attitude.

So I'm not surprised by the recent collapse. That's why my confidence is higher than ever that we'll be okay.