Income is welcome whenever it arrives, but when it arrives the day after the first round of entering figures in the computer–which is in the first quarter by IRS calculation–then the estimated tax part (which–since I write for a living, and the income is wildly variable from quarter to quarter as well as unpredictable–is surprisingly tricky to figure)\u00a0 it’s all to be done over again.\u00a0\u00a0 And at least one printer in the house decides every year that printing tax documents is something it would rather not do.\u00a0\u00a0 This year’s printer ploy was announcing it was out of paper when it wasn’t.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 However: taxes are now signed, sealed into envelopes, ready to mail tomorrow.\u00a0 Whew.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I had a writer friend and another friend over for a family dinner yesterday, and the writer friends and I got into what’s going on with his book and my book (and he and my husband got into details of naval warfare in WWII and other friend and our son were talking about goodness knows what, while I finished getting food on the table.\u00a0 Later it was various air adventures on the Eastern Front (or Western Front, if you’re Russia) in WWII, and bad movies, and…”Is there more [foodname]?”)\u00a0 ANYway.<\/p>\n
I was talking about the difficulty of working as much in-story time as I need to into Book IV, in order to finish the whole arc in Book V,\u00a0 especially since Amrothlin (Kieri’s elven uncle) is such a motormouth once you finally get him talking.\u00a0 Well, yes, we need to know all that but not in one great outpouring.\u00a0\u00a0 Besides the number of words it takes up, which I need for other things.<\/p>\n
What have I learned in the last few days, while juggling dinner, taxes, politics, conversations, and so forth…that I can tell you?\u00a0\u00a0 Well…the last two volumes are engaging each other, rather than their writers, and seem to be deciding where the break should come.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve had some plot bombs but far more of those annoying hints<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Could X be Y?\u00a0\u00a0 Will this one survive?\u00a0 Will that one?\u00a0 WHICH, dadgummit!!\u00a0\u00a0 Just to show that writers, too, can be teased and frustrated by their stories.<\/p>\n But now–it’s evening, and I feel the need to get up and walk around.\u00a0\u00a0 Last night’s headache, that lingered all night, is now small enough I can almost (the twinge in one sinus just reminded me) forget about it.\u00a0\u00a0 Tomorrow morning’s the time to hit the chapter running.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Income is welcome whenever it arrives, but when it arrives the day after the first round of entering figures in the computer–which is in the first quarter by IRS calculation–then the estimated tax part (which–since I write for a living, and the income is wildly variable from quarter to quarter as well as unpredictable–is surprisingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1163,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions\/1163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}