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Tue, 28 Sep 2004
Yesterday, I made a herculean effort to get on top of my accounts. This is one of the tasks you never fantasize about when you lust for the job of being a full-time novelist -- but it's part of the package all the same, along with the book signings and the reviews and all the rest of it. Yes, for about 1% of your working life you turn into a bookkeeping clerk, in order that the authorities leave you alone to carry on writing tales of far- flung adventures beyond the cosmos. It's no wonder so many authors wig out and become libertarians (unless they're Tom Holt, in which case they have an unfair advantage over the rest of us) ...
Being a native of Airstrip One, I don't deal with the US IRS's schedule but with Her Majesty's Inland Revenue (who are pretty much similar except for a different style of pastel-tinted brochures, which you can find on their immense website if you feel like seeing how the other side live). I pay my tax on the basis of an annual estimate (the self-assessment system), and have to file my accounts for a given tax year by January 31st of the next year or risk a hefty fine. If the earlier estimate turns out to be off-base the IR then either charge me an extra dollop or give me a refund.
Being too chicken to do the job myself, I pay an accountant to deal with the Inland Revenue for me. But my accountant charges an accountant-worthy hourly rate, so I don't just throw raw receipts at him -- I tally them up first in a spreadsheet, broken down by category. Yesterday I ploughed through an eight-inch thick stack of receipts, weeding out irrelevant junk that had crept in by mistake (like restaurant meals at home an car petrol vouchers), and sorting and collating the important stuff. Then I entered it all in the spreadsheet. I figure I'm about halfway through the job. If I'm lucky it'll even all add up in the end.
This is, of course, the real reason why I've finally come down with the cold that's been hovering over me for the past week. Feorag's already had it and is recovering. It's the usual fallout from too many long-haul flights and dry air-conditioned hotel rooms. I just wish it would go away in time before my next flight (Saturday) and leave me to the misery of doing the annual return without the added sniffles.
I'm half-tempted to go into more detail and rant about the headaches of accounting for income in half a dozen currencies (some of which is paid net of local withholding taxes, some of which is tax-exempt, and some of the tax on which can be claimed as a tax deduction from the UK's tax authorities -- let's just say, I've had more than one brush so far with the mind-numbing complexities of international reverse double-taxation treaty law) ... but I suspect you'd stop reading pretty rapidly if I did that.
So instead I'm going to hole up in bed, snuffling into a pile of tissues and drinking a hot toddy, leaving the tax return for another day, while I muse about the possibility of writing a story about the Inland Revenue's crack vampire audit team ("you may be undead, sir, but that does not qualify you for a tax holiday").
posted at: 22:03 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entryspecials:
Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex
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Some webby stuff I'm reading:
[ Engadget ]
[ Gizmodo ]
[ The Memory Hole ]
[ Boing!Boing! ]
[ Futurismic ]
[ Walter Jon Williams ]
[ Making Light (TNH) ]
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[ Bruce Sterling ]
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[ Cyborg Democracy ]
[ Body and Soul (Jeanne d'Arc) ]
[ Atrios ]
[ The Sideshow (Avedon Carol) ]
[ This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow) ]
[ Jesus's General ]
[ Mick Farren ]
[ Early days of a Better Nation (Ken MacLeod) ]
[ Respectful of Otters (Rivka) ]
[ Tangent Online ]
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[ Hacktivismo ]
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[ Whatever (John Scalzi) ]
[ GNXP ]
[ Justine Larbalestier ]
[ Yankee Fog ]
[ The Law west of Ealing Broadway ]
[ Cough the Lot ]
[ The Yorkshire Ranter ]
[ Newshog ]
[ Kung Fu Monkey ]
[ S1ngularity ]
[ Pagan Prattle ]
[ Gwyneth Jones ]
[ Calpundit ]
[ Lenin's Tomb ]
[ Progressive Gold ]
[ Kathryn Cramer ]
[ Halfway down the Danube ]
[ Fistful of Euros ]
[ Orcinus ]
[ Shrillblog ]
[ Steve Gilliard ]
[ Frankenstein Journal (Chris Lawson) ]
[ The Panda's Thumb ]
[ Martin Wisse ]
[ Kuro5hin ]
[ Advogato ]
[ Talking Points Memo ]
[ The Register ]
[ Cryptome ]
[ Juan Cole: Informed comment ]
[ Global Guerillas (John Robb) ]
[ Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes) ]
[ Simon Bisson's Journal ]
[ Max Sawicky's weblog ]
[ Guy Kewney's mobile campaign ]
[ Hitherby Dragons ]
[ Counterspin Central ]
[ MetaFilter ]
[ NTKnow ]
[ Encyclopaedia Astronautica ]
[ Fafblog ]
[ BBC News (Scotland) ]
[ Pravda ]
[ Meerkat open wire service ]
[ Warren Ellis ]
[ Brad DeLong ]
[ Hullabaloo (Digby) ]
[ Jeff Vail ]
[ The Whiskey Bar (Billmon) ]
[ Groupthink Central (Yuval Rubinstein) ]
[ Unmedia (Aziz Poonawalla) ]
[ Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood) ]
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(I screwed the pooch in respect of the blosxom entry datestamps on March 28th, 2002, so everything before then shows up as being from the same time)
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