Tax Day

Tally Ho.

The last two months were tight financially. I’ll just put that out there before I even get started.

Part of that is because I’m a classaholic and I spend a ridiculous amount of money on classes for my children to attend. It's not very unschooly, but that’s fodder for another post.

So today it was time to pay Uncle Sam. Oh boy.

I’m usually pretty adept at keeping track of expenses, saving receipts and guesstimating how much our family will owe the government come tax season. Usually the brain surgeon doesn’t mark down any deductions, so we have a hefty amount from his paycheck going to the IRS. This plan doesn’t leave the brain surgeon any spending money, but that’s what his babe is for.

The babe's bringing home the (vegan) bacon.

I make some estimated payments so by the end of the year, we’re usually pretty good to go. I usually even overpay, so I can roll the amounts over each year for extra insurance.

But I really screwed up this year.

Somehow I owe almost $6,000 more than what we’ve paid. That’s fun. I’m a freelance writer. I'm supposed to have more writeoffs than income. Clearly I’m doing something wrong.

It’s the self-employment tax that got me. The total was over twelve grand and, obviously, I paid only about half that. Yikes.

That got me thinking about what projects I have in the pipeline and things are looking up.

At the moment, I’m working on three articles for a hospital alliance that I’ve been working with for about four years: one for Health Affairs, one for HFM magazine and one for Critical Care Medicine.

All of these publications are peer-reviewed in a sense, but I’m most interested in publishing the Critical Care Medicine piece. It's a manuscript about Rapid Response Teams and has a lot going for it as far as topic and data, and I swear this manuscript has been with me for years. Really.

Anyway, it's medspeak, but trust me, Rapid Response Teams matter if you're the person lying in the hospital bed.

I’m also working on a peer-reviewed manuscript on adrenoleukodystrophy. This one is for a physician who’s wife works with the brain surgeon when the brain surgeon works trauma at the county ER. Good stories from that place. Anyway, adrenoleukodystrophy is the disease that is the focus of the movie Lorenzo’s Oil.

Great flick. Horrible disease.

I’m ghostwriting two books for addiction specialists this spring. This one is two separate projects. The authors know each other, but are not working together. These are newer projects and are quite juicy, but I'm not sure how much I can disclose.

I’m writing a poster for a CME provider, writing a news story for IVD Technology magazine, and doing my usual copyediting and occasional writing for the Center for the Advancement of Health: that’s my current nonprofit gig with Health Behavior News Service. I think I’m well into the hundreds of articles edited for them, but only write about one a month. Still, if you see proofing errors, they are likely my fault. I’m starting to really like writing those stories, though, especially the more controversial ones.

I’m doing some PR work this month on a product launch for a line of greener cleaners. More on that as it unfolds.

Oooohhh.

Ahhhhh.

What is this mystery cleaner?

Stay tuned...

Oh, and Thursday I’m writing an edition of FiercePharma to as a mutual test to see if I will write and edit for them, as I’m on the West Coast and they want their news to the copyeditor by 11 a.m. EST. Not sure that gig’s gonna work, but we’ll see.

So that’s it on the writing front at the moment.

Today was hectic (like that’s unusual). We had a broker caravan parade through our condo at 11:00 a.m. With client calls – which I try to pack in on Tuesdays and Thursdays – and three kids, imagine how NOT FUN it was to try to scramble and get the place spic and span by 11. It sucked.

It especially on tax day and especially when I had nowhere to actually put the kids during the caravan.

My office space on the strip was packed full and the caravan was, of course, right during lunchtime and naptime. Urgh.

After the logistical caravan hell was over, the kids finally had a brief (and late) car nap. Then we had dinner (vegan spaghetti and mushroom meatballs from Trader Joe's) cooked by the brain surgeon.

I'm going to miss him when he starts operating again.

Then the brain surgeon put the kids to bed while I finished up everything with urgent deadlines. Mainly, I copyedited one news story on mistletoe and another on exercise and cognition.

The brain surgeon ordered “Alien vs. Hunter” from Netflix, so I made fun of him all night. He was hoping it was like “Alien vs. Preditor,” so I made even more fun of him.

He apparently thought a sequel to a bad movie would be entertaining. The brain surgeon sometimes (usually) enjoys movies that allow him to be brain dead, but even had to laugh at himself on this one.

Toodles!