How Jody Became a Land Baron, sort of

Iconic 'Hat & Boots' gas station, since restored and relocated, is the first thing Jody sees when arriving in Seattle

Britannica, Part I of a 3-part series:
    Jody Scott, "the greatest writer you've never heard of," (F&SF Mag) and recipient of enough critical praise and peer recognition to choke a small pony, did not make money from her writing!  And yet she wrote full time, 5 or 6 hours a day almost every day for 40 years without having also to hold down a job.
    How she managed that has been the subject of some speculation. As Jody's spouse and business partner for 30 years I figured I would spill the beans here and now, entre nous as it were, as to exactly what we did to earn a living.
   When Jody and I meet in the late '70's she is selling Irondale Lots. This becomes the model for the land business we will found a few years later. But to understand what Irondale was, how it worked and how it came about we need to flashback a couple decades.
    Some time after the Leites and Berkeley and Circle Magazine, Jody meets OT Wood, a brilliant painter, but not a model of mental stability. She thinks to herself, 'We should make a baby together, it's bound to be brilliant.' So they do, make a baby together that is, but OT's mom commits suicide in LA and they decide California is for the birds and make the grueling, pre-interstate trek up Highway 99 to Seattle. At that time considered the uncivilized end of the world, just before you tumble off the map.
    OT is worthless as a breadwinner and soon gone anyway.  With a kid to support, no family or friends in the area, no money, no savings, no welfare state to fall back on, Jody answers an ad in the paper for an Encyclopedia Britannica sales position, gets the job and hires a babysitter- even though she has no money with which to pay the babysitter.   

Ads like these produced leads that were then sold to the door-to-door salesmen as "hot leads." Jody didn't find them "hot" so she developed a phone pitch and cold called the reverse phone directory to generate her own "hot leads."

     The training and sales routines for the "Sperm-of-the-Month club," in chapter 17 of I, Vampire is based on that Britannica experience. 
    With her usual determination and skill, Jody is a smashing success!  The babysitter gets paid and the checks started rolling in. She even manages to pen a novel during these years, but selling is a job and like all jobs, if you stop doing it, it stops paying you.  
    There has to be a better way than selling all day, raising a child alone and squeezing in a little writing when time and exhaustion allow. 
    Enter E.P. Jeff Jaffarian, one time pal of Richard Nixon, sometime photographer and pornographer, recent tax auction purchaser of a platted-into-lots-but-since-reclaimed-by-the-forest town on the banks of Puget Sound called Irondale.

Irondale circa 1900

(continued next time)