cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 new opportunities Hmm. I need more money, I've done a lot of travel in the last 18 months or so and I can write really fast. The obvious result of this situation hit me this evening. I'll just do some travel writing on the side. So I wrote up a quick 700 word piece about my last destination and how to do it cheap and weird. I spent maybe 45 minutes on it and sent it right out to the editor of the crappy travel section of a large regional newspaper. Ha. I kept it really short because if she didn't know that she wanted it until she saw it, she certainly doesn't have room in the layout for next Sunday for a 2,000 word piece. They want short stuff mostly for travel sections these days, anyway. I figure that I could do 3 or 4 more pieces like that based on where I've been lately. Then I can get some extra money out of the trips coming up for the new books by writing travel articles about each destination. I can write this shit so fast that the time isn't even an issue. I doubt I'll get much for them. Maybe $100 eaches. That's ok. If I was trying to make a living off of just travel writing then I'd be fucked. But that isn't the case. I just need supplementary income between book advance payments and this is one more piece of that. I'm also still doing the rifle reviews for that website, since they pay me so promptly. We're going to look at a house for rent next week. I've fucking had it with this place. Unless I get a really huge book advance that will allow me to pay for both places, I'm going to unload this house and land. I give up and I want out. We'll move into a new place and totally clear out this old house. Then I'll probably try putting it on the market for a month or so to see if it sells. If not, I'm going to hand over the deed and just let the bank have their collateral. I can't live like this any more. The move into a new house is happening no matter what the advance situation is. I'm paying a total of $1,700 a month on this place between 2 loans. This on a monthly income of about $3,000. There is no insulation and there are actual cracks in the house, so it costs about $400-$600 a month to heat this place. I'm fucking dying here. We can rent a really nice house for $1,400 or less. With 2 or 3 levels, 3 or 4 bedrooms, multiple bathrooms, closets, a real kitchen. Maybe even a garage. This house has no closets. The kids' bedrooms are so drafty and the inaccessible heating ducts under them are so trashed that we can't really heat them at all in the winter, so we all have to sleep in one room lately. The situation has become unbearable. Its literally worse than a lot of third world countries. The roof is now leaking in a few places and the furnace is getting really fucked up. I fixed it as best as I could, but it only runs for maybe 45 minutes at a time, at best. Then it just blows cold air and makes the house even colder. I have to get out of bed a dozen times a night to keep the whole house warm, so ofter we have to make do with a space heater. The house is just not worth fixing. The foundation is collapsing, as are the floor joists. It was badly engineered in the first place and built with inadequately dimensioned lumber. If you fixed everything there is to fix then there would be nothing left. We'd be selling the place for the value of the land, which was what we bought it for in the first place. I don't know what the fuck the bank was thinking when they gave us a loan on it (not that this is their fault). So we're leaving as soon as possible. The move will have to wait until my next advance chunk comes, since we'll need cash for the deposit and moving expenses. Should I feel bad about walking away from 2 mortgages? No, I don't think so. There is a reason why those contracts specify the house as collateral. The bank decided that they were prepared to take the real estate in lieu of payment, so that is what will happen. I'm going to formally hand over the deed to them rather than forcing them to incur the costs of a forecl0sure process. I have borne this for as long as I could, as my income dropped and dropped over the years. Not many people would have kept it up as long as I have. Literally I am paying 75% of my dependable monthly income on housing and heat. This cannot continue. So we're getting the fuck out of here and are well into looking at houses to rent. This won't be forever. Hopefully I'll get a big enough advance when I get to the third book (my schedule right now is about 1 book a year, but I have an opportunity to co-author another one that would be an easy side-project) I can steer most of it straight into buying a piece of land with all cash. Then we can start building on it and create a life that doesn't require any kind of debt or monthly rent of any kind. 8:27 p.m. - 2011-01-09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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