…and my brother has finally gotten moved into his new house…hurrah!…all of which were simultaneous: the fish book was to keep me from climbing the walls, something I know awake or asleep, and sans crisis—
Back to the novel outlne. I fortunately have approached this one with an outline, 10,071 words, so far—so that I know exactly where I am, it’s easy to review, and I’m right back into the swing of it. I don’t outline everything, but I do when life is apt to go crazy.
I’m delighted to say, this one should be fun.
And that because of the outline, I’ll know exactly where I’m going, since the next upcoming distraction is that annual American self-torture ritual, which is not, however, the Ides of April: April is a month in which the ides fall on the 13th day, which atevi consider lucky.
Not so most of my countrymen…
But—things are getting less complex. We’ve got a kind of routine. Jane and I will get to it RSN. Around April Fools’, we ritually sit together in the office and periodically have a meltdown trying to find things, which lasts about 3 days, or until we mail the bundle off to our longsuffering accountant and ask him to ask for the ritual extension…
When I was working for a small firm, I’d rubber cement yellow legal sized envelopes into each monthly folder, make my employers surrender all receipts when they came back to the office, and shove them into that envelope. I found it very helpful when the first day of spring came around, and I started my run up for taxes. It was also sly fun to watch Mac go through all his pockets and clean out his wallet for me.
Yeah, I imagine yours must be a real bear! Mine’s much easier, I’m sure, but still about the limit of my own tolerance. I can do ’em with TurboTax. Submitted Sunday.
We have to use Quick Books Pro. Now that it is more simple, I keep threatening to do it with Quicken instead, but QBP has some features that’d be hard to replace.
At one point I got furious with QB, which is not uncommon. I tossed it and tried Peachtree. I ordered their overpriced program, the special check forms you have to use. I studied it in every spare moment. I entered the whole account, which took time, let me tell you, even starting at a year-beginning.
I have never encountered such a zooey program. Double entry bookkeeping is not for me, and the company— absolutely the pits. I got so mad trying to solve what would have been a button push on QB that I threw the entire thing in the trash, diced all the checks, and went back to QB, which took another lengthy re-entry of the stuff that had gone down the pike since the last time I’d used the program. To this day I get solicitations from Peachtree, and my blood pressure goes up in response.
I keep threatening to toss the something like thirty years of back history with QB and start afresh without the baggage, but that in itself would be a bear. So we just creak on, with a DB the size of General Motors.
I had perhaps a similar early experience with CA Simply Tax. It wouldn’t let me go where I needed to go to adjust/correct entries. The UI Simply Sucked.
Perhaps you’ve seem the cartoon of a duck smashing a computer terminal with a big wooden mallet? That was the first and only time since I started playing with computers in 1966 that I was that frustrated.
Yeah, I’m forever embedded in Turbotax, if only because of multiyear depreciation schedules. And, while I do have small Schedule C’s for my wife and myself, I’m sure my taxes are vastly simpler than yours. I can’t imagine what might be involved with multi-year/national royalties, foreign royalties, apportionment of expenses among books (I know my mother had to depreciate each calf separately 50 years ago when we had a dairy farm). My father, who had been a big shot businessman in Los Angeles, was never any help–he had always just had the accountant take care of everything, wave of the hand, until that IRS audit led to a new accountant. She handled the farm and then the family finances until I was about 16; then she handed everything over to me, much to my despair.)
I sympathize greatly.
I’m really interested in the new book, I must have missed an earlier comment: Topic? Type? Any relationship to your previous universes?
I had noticed recently you hadn’t started one yet. And I have had the impression from your comments in the in the past that you didn’t like to start a new project until you were in the groove and had all your ducks–plot, contract, mind set, etc.–in a row. If you’ve answered this already, could you point me to the comment so I don’t waste your time.
I really love your work. As with the best writing, much that you’ve written has grown upon reflection. Perhaps the best recent example I can think of is “Regenesis.” The way you communicate the slow, step-by-step way that the common norms of acceptable political behavior unravel in a slow descent, effectively, into civil war is masterful. And all too parallel to the course of “civil” society during these last several decades.
But, hey. If you want to inhabit a lighter world gestalt, I’ll happily follow you there, too.
Best wishes on your latest.
Lol—thank you so much. there’s a short story which we’re trying to get organized to get out.
And there’s a Foreigner book I’m ready to turn in, which will be out about this time next year.
There’s the Foreigner book I’m working on.
And just because I could, I wrote a nonfiction book on How to set up a marine tank, with which I hope to save a few fish from untimely demise.
How does one find the fish book? I have poked around on Amazon under your name and it does not seem to be in closed circle…
I have had fresh for ages, and am thinking about starting a salt water.
When I started having to deal with Schedule D, after my mother died, I started having a tax preparer do it. (Even better, that means it gets filed electronically.) I don’t know what software she uses – I don’t need to. She’s happy that she doesn’t have to type in all the 1099 information by hand any more.
Since our business is incestuously connected with our personal lives, we skip to the chase and have a proper tax accountant handle all of it. We sent him our documentation last week, and he sent us a bill yesterday, indicating he was done and has e-filed for us. Best money we spent so far this year, and having it done on time and properly is priceless. I watch my father struggling with his taxes (he adamantly doesn’t want to turn them over to an outside party) and cringe.