Good Grief! Today is What???

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

This year the Christmas elves have morphed into malign gremlins, entangling me in strings of tinsel and lights and sending me crashing flat on my face. I try not to post just one essay to both my first Wednesday blogs, preferring to do two different posts on two different subjects, but this time I really have no choice. You see, I forgot. It is now almost half an hour after they should have gone up online, and I am sitting desperately writing in a dark cold office while every other creature in the house is contentedly sleeping, including The Husband.

I do have good excuses/reasons – many of them. Christmas shopping. Out of town family come to visit. Self-indulgently, parties. A couple of meetings that could not be missed. Two hard deadlines breathing fire down my neck – one to finish a book, the other to finish edits. A chronic physical health problem flaring up, as usual at the most inconvenient time. And, perhaps the most annoying of all, this is our seventh week of having no internet at home, meaning that I will be breakfasting at my favorite internet café as soon as it opens in order to get this posted. I really don’t know whether to go ‘sigh’ or ‘grrrr.’ Or both.

As I have said before, do not marry an overly-analytical man. It does get ugly.

So now what shall I say to redeem myself? Nothing, because the forgetting of such a long-standing and treasured responsibility is unacceptable. Hand to heart, I promise to be better.

With any luck at all, all our Christmas shopping will be done this week. Except for my own present, I do all the shopping for the family, but I have been known to have to buy my own occasionally. In both The Husband’s and my families we only give token gifts as we are all blessed with what we really need, but the list is long and it is hard to find even tokens that are not outrageously expensive. As I lurch from store to store, happily shrinking list and traumatized credit card in hand, it is a painful mental gymnastic to think of something appropriate to give each individual. I predict that the gift-card people will be getting most if not all of our business this year.

So, dear reader, the hour is wee, the office is cold, and I am tired. Again, I beg your pardon for such culpable behavior, do promise to be better, and wish each and every one of you a very Merry Christmas!

(And if you see a couple of elves with sinister expressions carrying ropes of tinsel and lights, please don’t tell them that you’ve seen me!)

Small Business Saturday (& Taxes)

by Kaye George

I like the concept that’s being promoted this year. Friday is the day to camp out and burst through the doors of major merchandisers. The people who wrote the SBS ad campaign realize this, they’re not fighting that tradition, but they want you to consider patronizing small businesses the next day. (I didn't realize this concept started in 2010 by American Express. I would have thought some small business organization would have started it.)

Small businesses are good, right? Buy local!

If you’re a writer, you’re a small business, too. If you’re self-published or traditionally, you’re still a small business (unless you’re a big one and everybody in the world knows your name). Next month will be the end of your business year if you run on a calendar year. Some time between January and April, you’ll have to start getting your expenses ready for filing taxes.

There are, surprisingly, a few writers who don’t know the special rules that apply to them. Even seasoned tax consultants sometimes don’t know! So I’m here to tell you! (I recently posted a similar article in the Guppy newsletter, but feel it deserves all the audience it can get among writers.)

There is a well-known Hobby Rule that says you can't take deductions if you don't make a profit in 3 out of the past 5 years. This does NOT apply to writers. I've collected a few articles that shed light on this and I'd like to share them here.

The bottom line is that writers can take deductions for an indeterminate number of years, since even the IRS knows how hard it is to make money as an author. There ARE certain things you should do to prevent coming up short in case of an audit, however.

I'll mention that I'm not an authority. My tax experience is limited--I prepared taxes for H&R Block for a few years and don't have any degrees in accounting--but I do keep alert for parts of the tax code that affect me.

The source files I've collected are too long to include here. One file is 4 pages long, the other is 18 pages long. I'll give you the locations where I got them, though, in case you want to collect them together for yourself.

Here are the highlights.

http://writerinterrupted.com/2012/03/13/hobby-loss-interpretation-for-writers/

You can help your case by being professional about your writing: joining writers' organizations, spending time networking, keeping good records of how you spend your time, showing that you're attempting to get into publication by submitting and keeping records of that, taking classes to improve as a writer to demonstrate effort toward publication. You can even make money some years and not other years if you can show the above things to an auditor.

This article (http://www.eclectics.com/articles/taxes.html), called Authors and the Internal Revenue Code by Linda Lewis, goes into great detail and cites lots of IRS Section codes. It also enumerates the classifications for deductions. It's helpful to me to put these on a spreadsheet and keep track of them throughout the year so I can slap them onto my Schedule C when the time comes. OK, I won't tell you how many months I'm behind in this task, but I do have the spreadsheet and a folder full of receipts. There are cases in this article to illustrate right and wrong ways to go about being a writer.

One last link (http://www.artstaxinfo.com/writers.shtml) to an article by CPA Peter Jason Riley, goes over expenses in detail a little differently and has some PDF and Excel worksheets you might find useful.

Please look at the original articles I've given links to before you do your taxes next year if you've been unaware of these details. The life of a writer is hard enough--no need to make it harder by not taking your deductions.

And happy shopping at your local stores!