Angela Benedetti

I’m Torquere’s Featured Author this week, with an interview and bio and all up on the site. Some questions were particular to A Hidden Magic and some were more general; check it out here.

Angie

I just joined a gym. There’s a 24-Hour Fitness in the shopping center right across the street from our new place. It’s like a three minute walk away, so I have no excuse for not going. I plan to go at least four times a week. [determined look] We’ll see how this goes.

Our new place really isn’t big enough for working out, though; it has more square footage than our old place, but the footprint is much smaller (the whole three-story thing) so there’s not much room in any one room/area for walking around, which was most of what I was doing last year. I’m past the point where my joints seize up in the middle of walking, though; if I keep the speed down, that doesn’t happen anymore, so I’m not restricted to just walking back and forth inside like I was before last year, when I never knew when I was going to need to sit down Right Now. I’ve also progressed beyond my five-pound hand weights; they still work, in that enough reps of pretty much anything will get you aching, but it’ll be more efficient to have access to a wider variety equipment.

We signed up for three personal training sessions, where someone who knows what they’re doing will take us around and have us try various things, figure out what we should do, how many and at what weight/setting/whatever, and kind of set things up. I haven’t had a weights class in ages, and they have different equipment than my college did anyway, so that’ll be handy.

[Yes, I said "we" -- Jim signed up too. I'm only committing for myself, though, and I expect I'll go more often than he will just because I have more time. Jim can blog about it on his own if he wants. [grin]]

The 24-hour part means I can go whenever I want, which is great. I’m often at my freshest and most energetic in the middle of the night, so being able to go work out then will be good.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to this, and hopefully posting about it will keep me from slacking off, LOL!

Angie

So we wanted this townhouse. Nice, brand new, decent square footage, tiny bit of yard. Not perfect, but within our price range, and in an unbeatable location, which is important for two people who don’t drive.

We put in an offer, were accepted, were all ready to go about a week and a half ago when four creditors popped up and reminded the builder that he owed them a lot of money. They activated liens and everything ground to a halt. With that many corporations and lawyers involved, and a builder who seemed to be completely broke (even selling the townhouse wasn’t going to make him any money — our understanding is that he owed every cent to the bank already) the chances of our getting the place seemed slim to nil. Sure, maybe if we could wait around for a few weeks or months while everyone fought and haggled, but we don’t have that much per diem left, and don’t particularly want to start throwing money down the rental-pit while we wait for them to straighten things out, on the possibility that we might be allowed to buy it whenever they get around to figuring out who gets to sell it.

So we looked around, found a house in the same neighborhood, a couple of blocks from the shopping center which was across the street from the townhouse. The place was old and it’d need a lot of work, but it had good bones and it was a lot cheaper, so we could afford to upgrade the wiring and the pipes and put insulation and wallboard in the “finished” basement, replace the ancient windows with something energy efficient, fence the yard, and cetera. When that was done, we’d have a lot more space and a huge yard. I was actually enthusiastic about this; it’d be more work and hassle, but less money in the long run for a bigger place.

We put an offer on the house, a good one, and since our condo was near to closing we had cash on the way and could put up a full down payment with no sales contingency, whereas the other party competing with us wasn’t in as good a position. We were pretty sure we’d get the house, and that was cool. Jim was still a little iffy about all the work needed, but had satisfied himself that we could afford to do it, and that we’d have a lot more in the end, for less than the townhouse would’ve cost us.

In the background, our finance guy (Derek) and the builder’s real estate guy (Tom) were working frantically trying to get the townhouse deal to go through. I didn’t think it was going to happen in any reasonable time frame, and neither did our real estate guy (Scott). Jim stayed hopeful, but I basically wrote the townhouse off and concentrated my hopes and plans on the house, and that deal proceeded apace.

Then we got word that Derek and Tom had pulled off a miracle and gotten the four creditors to all sign releases on the liens. The one minor creditor, who was only owed a thousand dollars, wanted $750; the builder (I think) paid a few hundred, Tom paid a few hundred out of his commission, and we wrote a check for a few hundred. Fine, the guy’ll agree to go away, we’ve got the townhouse and can move in in less than a week, yay!

We were still a bit wary, and Scott still wasn’t believing that the miracle would hold, so he told the sellers of the house that we had some concerns about previous water issues in the basement, which had come up during disclosure. It was true so far as it went, and it’d buy us some time.

With Plan B still in place, we went through the rest of the purchase process on the townhouse. A notary came to the hotel and we signed and initialed the usual bazillion papers, Jim wired the down payment to the escrow company, and we were all ready to go. The deed would be recorded on Friday, or maybe late Thursday, depending on how things came together, and we’d be homeowners again. I was still a bit disappointed about the house, but happy the process was almost over with; I’m really sick of living out of suitcases at a hotel.

Thursday Jim came home and said, “Guess what.” :/

A fifth creditor had turned up, someone owed more money than any of the previous four. (The largest amount from the first group was $50K; this creditor was owed about $80K.) And he hadn’t just popped up out of the woodwork, either — he had a judgement dated the fourth, so he’d been pursuing his claim for a while. The deed hadn’t been recorded in our names yet, so everything screeched to a halt.

Now, the first question to ask is why the bleep the title company didn’t find this? That’s what they do, after all, and if there was a court judgement, it’s not like the creditor was hiding or anything. The next question to ask is whether there are any more creditors waiting in the wings, and why the builder didn’t disclose all of this up front; if there are financial issues which might prevent a sale, you’re supposed to let potential buyers know, so they can decide whether they feel like diving into your mess.

Jim and I were both fed up with the on/off/on/off crap, so we gave them (pretty much everyone working the deal) until close of business Friday to straighten it out. If it wasn’t ready to go through by then, deed recorded, the property ours, everything done and finished, then we were washing our hands of it, demanding our down payment back, and going for the house. Again, I thought that was the end of it.

Turns out Derek and Tom had another miracle in their pockets; they got everything straightened out by Friday evening. Tom persuaded the fifth creditor to take a thousand dollars, which he’d pay himself, and we agreed that after closing we’d give him a check for half of it. (I have no clue why they bothered when they were willing to settle for that little; it must’ve cost them more than a thousand to file the papers and go through the court process, no? [blinkblink]) So it’s all over and done with, the deed is registered, the place is ours. We now own a townhouse in West Seattle. And if any more creditors pop up, it’s too late to fight over the townhouse; they can go argue over the builder’s pocket lint or whatever; we’re out of it.

I think I’m going to feel a bit of regret for the house with its the enormous yard, and the huge downstairs room (half the house’s footprint) that was going to be the office/library (mostly mine), for quite a while. On the other hand, we won’t have to either pay for a hotel for another month or three while we fix the place up, or deal with workers coming in and out around us for however many months, while the sixty-year-old place gets brought up to 21st century standards. And Jim’s promised me a house house when he retires, which is only a few years away.

Next step is to buy a dozen or twenty bookcases. We had books stacked and piled and back-filled in corners and covering every bare patch of floor for years in the condo, and the few bookcases we had were over-filled with extra books on top of the properly shelved ones, and piled up in front of them. It was all but impossible to find anything we’d bought within the last half dozen years, unless it was purchased recent enough that it was up on the top of the strata. It’ll be great to be able to actually shelve all the books and have everything in order, to say nothing of Jim’s CDs and our DVDs. I hate clutter to that extent, but we didn’t have any place to put stuff away, and no place to put bookcases or whatever. By the time we moved out, most rooms in our place (and it was a three-bedroom, mind you) had only traffic paths between key locations. Being able to spread out some will be pretty awesome.

I also have to go back to an electric stove. [grumble] I suppose I’ll get used to it. The next place will have gas.

I’m glad it all worked out. I could’ve done without the back-and-forthing, and on-again-off-again deals. All that’s over now, though, and I’m just as happy to have it so.

Angie

You know you’re a geek when you’re living out of suitcases for possibly a couple of months, and have ONE box of books and stuff that you shipped up to your hotel, and in that one really-too-small box of books you included a Latin dictionary.

Bonus points if you used it within the first week of receiving the box. [cough]

Angie

We got word that the builder from whom we’re in the process of buying a townhouse is having some legal/financial problems. Apparently he owes a number of people money and they’ve decided patience isn’t working anymore; they’re activating the liens on his property, and that includes the townhouse we want.

At first we were hoping that the creditors might let the sale go through, on the grounds that letting the builder come into a nice pile of cash would mean he’s more likely to be able to pay them at least something, rather than taking the property, having to go through the seizure procedure for however many months, and then sell it themselves. But our realty guy found out that the builder owes the bank too, and that the sale of the townhouse will only pay them off; he wasn’t going to make any actual profit on the townhouse sale. If that’s accurate, then the creditors have every reason to want the townhouse itself, and no motivation at all to let him sell it. :/

Our finance guy is still looking into things; he knows some people at the builder’s bank and is trying to see if there’s a way through the mess. I’m not holding my breath, though, and we pretty much expect to activate the recision (a document which basically says, “Sorry, not interested in diving into your mess,” and lets us get our earnest money back) by Monday latest.

Jim’s been looking through the real estate listings for the last couple of days, and our real estate guy’s been running around screening properties for us. We went and looked at a couple today. One’s a big house (almost 2500 square feet) just a block and a half from that cool shopping center near the townhouse; it’s not quite as convenient as the townhouse would’ve been, but it’s still a great location. It’s also a lot larger, and has a big backyard, which pleases me very much. The downside is that it’s almost sixty years old. The wiring is ancient — only five circuits for the whole house, and none of the outlets are grounded. We’d have to upgrade the wiring to handle computers and associated gear, plus the usual living room and kitchen electronics a 21st century family has these days. The finished basement also needs work; it doesn’t suck, and we’ve seen a lot worse, but it needs insulation and new wallboard at least, and the whole place could use new windows to help keep the weather out and our energy bills down. There are some issues with the siding, and something weird about the downspout drains, plus if we want a dog we’d need to refence the yard.

The wiring and insulation/walls downstairs will be the big ticket items, though, unless a home inspector trips over something major. Depending on how much it’d realistically cost to upgrade the place, we might or might not be able to afford it.

We also looked at another townhouse. It’s nice, about 100 square feet smaller than the other townhouse, but with a little fenced yardlet like the other one. The grounds aren’t as nice — the builder packed as many units as physically possible on to the lot, with most of them very skinny and one model four stories to get a reasonable amount of space onto the footprint, and standing outside one gets the impression of an asphalt canyon. There’s no open ground, not a bush or a blade of grass to be seen. It’s kind of depressing. The units are nice on the inside, but the environment leaves a bit to be desired. It’s also at least a mile to the nearest shopping.

We have a few other places we want to look at this weekend, and our real estate guy’s hunting for more. I’m sure we’ll find something that’ll work for us, even if the house we saw today turns out to be unworkable. It’s just a bummer to have to start over at this point. :/

Angie

Am I the only one who has trouble getting through some really good books?

I don’t mean the kind of “good” book that’s a classic, or something the critics have raved about — the kind of book you feel you should like, even when you don’t. I mean the kind of book you’re really enjoying, where you like the characters and the plot is interesting and all that, but for some reason it’s just really easy to put the book down and wander off to do something else, like, every few pages. :/

I just finished a book like that. It was m/m romance, which is a genre I enjoy. I liked the characters and their relationship arc — I particularly liked that the writer never took the easy path to shoving them together, but made them legitimately fight for it all the way through, with good reasons on both sides for doing so. The writing itself was clear, with few or no confusing or annoying bits. I finished it pleased and satisfied, and looking forward to getting the next book in the series. Which hopefully won’t take me months of on-and-off reading to get through.

About the only legitimate criticism I can think of is that the setting was kind of spotty and confusing. The book was a fantasy, set on an invented world, and the characters travelled through a number of lands, kingdoms, etc. There were different peoples, each with their own culture and language and such. All this would usually be good, but I had a hard time keeping track of who was which and where they were, so a reference to a Blah from Wherever would have me pausing to wrack my brain for a memory of when the Blahs had been mentioned before, and where Wherever was in relation to the lands 80% of the story took place in. I could tell that the writer put a lot of work into her worldbuilding, and did a good job of it; she just had a hard time communicating it to me as the reader in a coherent manner which would let me grasp her world as a whole, and see how all the pieces fit together.

If this had been a hardcopy release from a New York publisher, it probably would’ve had a map in it, and I would’ve referred to it fairly often. Having that graphic showing exactly where different places were in relation to one another, which land this town is in and where exactly the river by the protag’s village runs, would’ve helped a lot. I felt like I was expected to know exactly where the protag was going when he travelled north along the winding coast road, but the lands or towns up there had been mentioned some number of pages back, and I didn’t remember them; a map would’ve let me check quickly and easily, and then get right back to the story. I’ve never seen that kind of map in a fantasy e-book, although they’re common in hardcopy books; this is probably something e-pubs should consider.

But most of the time when I wandered away from reading, it wasn’t at a point where the writer had tossed out the name of a people or a place I should remember but didn’t, so I can’t really swear that was the reason I had such a hard time getting through the story.

I don’t know. I liked it, and I do want to read more of the series. I just had a hard time sinking into it for any length of time. Does that happen to anyone else? Any ideas why?

Angie

It just hit me a bit ago that I completely zoned on doing an Anthology Markets post this month. My husband and I were in Seattle on our househunting trip on the tenth, which is when I’ve been doing it, and although I could’ve done it from there, I just didn’t think about it at all. :/ Well, no one’s working over the holidays, right…? [hides under keyboard] The Antho Market listings will be back in January, and my apologies for the gap.

Seriously, though, Christmas just sort of came and went, and New Year will be marked with a bottle of Martinelli’s and not much else. We have holes in our ceiling from where the plumbers fixed a leak, holes in our walls from where other repair guys worked on yet another gas leak (more jackhammers a few days ago — I’m going to miss them when we move, or maybe not) plus the huge hole dug (yet again) in our concrete patio outside from where they replaced a chunk of said gas line. The gas guys will fix the patio in a day or two, but the guy who does drywall was called out of the country on a family emergency and will be back on the fourth. I’m keeping a set of virtual fingers crossed that everyone’s okay and he gets back on time.

There are boxes and piles all over — more than usual — because even though the moving guys are coming over (for an estimated two days) to pack for us, we have to go through things ourselves to sort and dispose, get things in order, and pack certain fragile things ourselves. Plus my husband has been packing books just… I don’t know, I guess because he’s been feeling antsy and wants to do something. Or something. Whatever. [pets frazzled husband] I spent yesterday going through the closet and dresser and some cupboards bagging up clothes and shoes for Goodwill; I have more stacks of clothes in corners and such around the bedroom to go through, but I stopped when my back went from griping to yelling. More of that tomorrow.

I’ve been practicing intermittent fasting — eating only every other day — since January, with one unplanned hiatus in March for a horrible attack of gastritis (during the first week of which I wasn’t eating anything anyway) and a few planned hiatuses for trips. There’s about thirty pounds less of me than there was a year ago, even though I flaked out on an exercise program over the summer after being faithful to it for several months, so all around I’ve been doing well on that. I’d rather be thirty pounds down after a year, than thirty pounds down after three months and then fifty pounds up after a second three months, which is the more usual pattern when weight loss is fast, so slow is just fine with me. Christmas finally defeated me, though — a bazillion cookies, plus my mom’s homemade almond roca and leftover prime rib forced an executive decision that the last seven days of the year I’d eat every day. I’ll be paying for that starting tomorrow, but whatever; the fasting works, and I’ll be back on track soon. If there’s another thirty pounds less of me at this time next year, I’ll be happy. It’s all about results, not following a routine slavishly.

Every year at this time I do the usual Writing Goals thing. For 2009 I promised myself I’d finish and submit a novel and I did that — I signed the contract on December 19th, and am waiting for edits. That’s a huge milestone and I’m proud of it, so Go 2009! for that chunk of it. I always include some sort of productivity goal as well, though, and I’ve never managed to keep it. I mean, a thousand words a day should be incredibly easy — there are certainly writers who do a lot more, and have for years or decades — but apparently not. :/ This year I’m trying something different: since the product goal worked better in ‘09 than the wordcount goal, I’m going with that. So for 2010, I want to finish another novel, plus half a dozen short stories, with the caveat that the fanfic novel which is just a few chapters from being done doesn’t count; the official goal is for another commercial, submittable-for-publication novel. (I still have to finish the fanfic novel, though, ’cause my readers on that side of the fence were incredibly patient while I set it aside to finish Hidden Magic.)

What else? Keep up on the fasting, and exercise more. Even my walking’s fallen off in the last month or so, which I’m sure is why my weight has plateaued during that time. Hopefully being in a new area after the move will get me doing more walking outside. I know I can now; I haven’t had an OMG-I-absolutely-HAVE-to-sit-down-NOW!! incident while walking in a while. (My joints and tendons and such tended to lock up or start screaming at random while I walked, and were keeping me housebound for quite a few years. I’ve been walking back and forth at home, where I’m never more than a few steps from a place to sit, for the last several years. It’s boring but it works, and you can put on some serious mileage in a small space if you’re determined.) Since I haven’t had to sit in the middle of walking for a while, though, that means I can actually go out for walks again, and feel secure that I won’t suddenly have to find a seat on some stranger’s retaining wall or front steps or on the curb. (And let me tell you, when you weigh what I do and have arthritis and various other joint-and-tendon problems, getting up off a seat on the curb is slow, difficult and painful.) So being able to go out walking again is something to look forward to. And hey, if we get the townhouse we made an offer on, there’ll be a Barnes and Noble in a shopping center right across the street — wow, incentive to go out and walk at least that far!

I can think of a bunch of other things I’d like to do, but I think this’ll be enough to commit to. One of the things I tend to do when making plans is way over-commit, then get depressed when I fail. I’d like to commit to not doing that anymore. We’ll see if it works out.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe New Year, and a great 2010. [wave/hugz]

Angie

We’re home now and mostly recovered, I think. Of course, I’m getting back on a plane on Sunday to go up to my mom’s for Christmas, and I have to admit the timing of all this could’ve been better.

We put in an offer on a condo, and the counter-offer was decent. Now it’s a matter of working out all financing details; we have enough money, but apparently it’s not distributed in the right pots, so the husband is working on getting it shuffled around into a configuration the banks will approve of. We’ll see if that comes through. If not, we’re still not really behind; we weren’t actually expecting to find anything on this trip; it was more to scout neighborhoods and such.

I’m not jumping up and down about the condo itself, although it’s not a bad place at all. It’s only a little bigger than what we have now, and I was hoping for something significantly larger. That six-bedroom house I mentioned in the previous post (four of the bedrooms plus one bathroom were part of a basement remodel, but it was done very nicely) would’ve been great, assuming it could’ve passed a home inspection. That’s the problem with remodels, of course; the house itself was about fifty years old, so who knows what was behind the drywall. It was on almost half an acre, which was also very cool. Unfortunately the nearest store of any kind was half a mile away, and that was just one grocery; other necessities were farther. Good (potentially) house, less than great location for folks who don’t drive. :/

The condo is new, so we don’t have to worry about booby traps, and our real estate guy managed to rustle up a home inspector the very next day. He found that the place is in good shape, with just a few little things which would be easy to fix. The big selling point, though, was the location — it’s right across the street from the back of a shopping center with a grocery store, a Barnes and Noble, a Target, a post office, a bunch of low- to mid-level restaurants, plus some other stuff, AND it was near two bus lines which would take Jim downtown to work within half an hour or less. There’s really nothing more we could ask of the location, and I’m willing to stay packed into something that’s really too small to be comfortable in for the next few years, until Jim retires. After that, we can find a cheaper area all together and get a bigger place with a nice yard (the condo has a little bit of fenced yard, just enough for a smallish dog, which will satisfy me for now) and a good location without having to scrape change out from under the seat cushions to pay for it.

Aside from the location, which is fantastic, it’s not what I was hoping. I can deal with the rest, though, and we can get something which suits us better in a few years, when Jim’s retired and we’re not locked into a particular location because of his work.

I have to admit, though, that having a big bookstore a two minute walk away would be very nice. Dangerous, but very nice.

Angie