$$$

I still haven't done my taxes. N just reminded me that, unlike Maine, MA post offices will run out of tax forms and not replace them and shrug scowlfully at you when you come along asking with a week to go. I ran into this problem last year and already forgot about it because I am dumb. OTOH, one can download and pront PDFs of these things, but it puts the timing into perspective.

My taxes have always been easy affairs heretofore, but in 2002 my income sources were all over the place: salary, unemployment, freelance and royalties. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. On jjohn's advice I am going to give myself one evening to see if i can't pull together the info I need via the Web. TurboTax looks inviting; I didn't realize it was a fully self-contained Web application. Well, there's my evening.

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Book got a healthy sales spike from the Slashdot review, it seems. Amazon sales rank went from the high fours to the low threes overnight. Yay yay.

Also got a P&X royalty check yesterday. It's twice as large as the last one. Huh?! Well, the book has apparently sneaked its way into two ORA CD Bookshelf collections now, both the Perl one and the XML one, and together they sell about as well as the dead-tree edition. That's business.

Meanwhile, my royalties from the Safari edition come to about thirty bucks. heh

In other P&X news, the editors above Linda think that it's too soon for 2E, and advise eray and I to hold off for a year. And we said: OK. Boy oh boy... this book and the Nutshell book are on different planets. (This does not mean that there aren't other booky ideas afoot which involve the two of us, but it is far too early to write anything more about that.)

So far so good

Started filing by way of turbotax.com. Pleased to learn that the 1040 (and its MA state equivalent) cover both W-2s and the small pile of 1099s I have accrued, so this thing handles them without problem. Holding off on finishing for now, since it sez that I can turn my negative balance into a small refund by stuffing some money into an IRA. I've pressed the right buttons over at NetBank to create a new IRA account, so now I'll wait and see if it'll pop open before the weekend. Whee, exciting.

Also, I ended up unexpectedly filling out a Schedule C form, claiming my technical writing operations as a self-run business. This gives me the opportunity to claim business deductions, something I haven't given any thought to. I bet I can name a few. (Hmm, I certainly bought a lot of coffee while writing those books... and scones, and bagels...)