For the first time in ten years, I was filing my own federal tax return on paper.  I entered all the numbers into TurboTax and then figured out where to put all the numbers on the paper form.  I owed the federal government $452 in taxes on my unemployment benefits.  I wasn’t going to pay $150 to file through TurboTax.  My tax situation is somewhat complicated by the business side of being a writer.  If I didn’t have that, I would’ve followed the same steps that I did with Dad’s tax returns.  Fortunately, state owed me $338.  With Dad helping out with half the rent and covering my newest car repair bill for a replacement ignition switch and battery, I was able to pay off the tax.  I filed my state return for free using CalFile.

Doing my own taxes made me appreciate the small business angle that I haven’t considered before.  I’ve been writing in red for the last five years from buying all those red pens to revise my work.  I haven’t started making money until now and I’m hoping to break even this year.  After struggling to fill out my own tax return, I took some steps to avoid repeating this awful annual ritual.

First, breaking down the numbers on a quarterly basis.  Shoving all the receipts into an envelope all year long is the easy part.  Figuring out how to break down the numbers at tax time is very time consuming.  Doing that every three months will make putting the final numbers together a snap.  I also did my first profit and loss statement.  I haven’t done one of those since I took business courses in college.  I’m updating that every two weeks to keep tabs on my income and expenses.  Ideally, income goes up and expenses come down.

Second, I started filing estimated taxes for both federal and state.  Technically, I’m not required to do so.  This is a preventive measure on my part to avoid not paying enough tax when I file my return next year.  If you start making some serious money as a writer, you want your tax bill to be current at all times.  Since I’ve shown a loss on tax returns for five years with little income, I need to prove that I’m running a business.  Only an honest small business would fork over money to the tax man.

Third, if I do reach the break even point and make more than $400 in profits, I will have to pay a 15% self-employment tax.  At first, that made me mad.  Looking into this deeper, this is half of what I would be paying in a regular job plus the employer contribution.  This amount is then reduced in half as a personal deduction.  Doesn't make much sense but that's how the tax law works.

I’m hoping that this year will be very profitable indeed—even if I do have to pay more in taxes.

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The initial impression that I gathered from my Twitter feed of writers and webcomic artists was using the iPad for presenting content.  Most writers saw the iPad and the iBookstore as an ebook competitor and what it means for publishing as a whole.  Most webcomic artists saw the iPad as a platform to present their archives or put together 24-page comics at near full-size and in color.  I'm looking at the iPad as a portable writing device and a programming platform.

What I need the most was a mobile replacement for my aging Mac mini (PPC) that has grown long in the tooth since the hard drive was killed last summer by killer dust bunnies after nearly five years of continuous use.  I need Pages (wordprocessing) from iWork for writing.  Check.  I need a virtual and physical keyboard support.  Check.  The price had to be less than a replacement Mac mini (Intel).  Check.

Ding-ding-ding! We got a winner!

As a writer, I can load up the iPad with my files and go anywhere to work with my manuscripts. Maybe the iPad will wean me away from yellow notepads and pens to finally embrace the paperless office.  Or someone will introduced a yellow notepad app with superb handwriting recognition.  Or, if the iPad ends up like my iPod Touch, it'll make a great paperweight Kindle reader.

I'm also looking for a new programming platform.  If I had the time, money and motivation when the iPhone first came out, I might've gotten in early on the app store craze and become an instant millionaire.  I haven't been enchanted by either the iPhone or Touch to jump on the bandwagon since then.  The one thing that I learned about being successful at anything is finding a niche that no one else wants and run with it.  I see opportunities to make to create applications that take advantage of the new iPad features.

I recently started reviewing the C programming language and plan to learn Objective-C programming language and the iPhone/iPad SDK.  My first applications will be similar to the Joomla! modules that I have done to pull pictures from various Twitter-based picture sharing websites.  If you look at Apple app store, you will find plenty of applications to upload pictures to these websites.  None, however, will pull pictures from those websites, present them in a slide show, and enable a user to set a picture as the wallpaper.

A more ambitious application is a kid-friendly turtle graphics with the LOGO programming language.  Why resurrect a near dead programming language on the iPad?

• There's nothing like that available in the Apple app store.
• The perfect opportunity to create a virtual version of Big Trak programmable tank that I loved as a kid, which, unbeknown to me at the time, was a physical version of the LOGO turtle.  (When Big Trak is reintroduced this year, I'm planning to get one and may casually steal the keypad interface for my own application.)
• The Berkeley LOGO (UCBLOGO) is a freeware interpreter with C source code that I can use in my own application without having to reinvent the wheel.
• The iPad is the perfect platform for an application of this nature.

When I get this application done, there are several more ideas I would like to pursue.  Once upon a time, I wanted to be a game programmer.  The iPad might be my ticket — especially if I become an instant millionaire.

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My unemployment check arrived a few days late with an automatic 13-week extension of benefits.  I'll be celebrating my one year anniversary of being laid off from my desktop support job in three weeks.  I'm starting to go stir crazy from being at home.  I told a recruiter to submit my resume for a position that pays $5 per hour less than what I was making at my last job.  While I'm not thrilled to be making only an extra $500 per month above my current budget if I got that job, recruiters look at you funny if you been out of work for more than a year.  Unlike the last time I took a year off from work, I don't have my mother's death from breast cancer and finishing school as an understandable reason.

I recently spoke to a recruiter who thought I sent him an outdated resume because my last job listed was in February 2009.  I told him that's correct and he wanted to know what was wrong with me.  That was a very awkward conversation.  Although I had talked to three or four recruiters a week and had three or four interviews per month, the recruiter didn't understand why I haven't gotten a job yet.  I then had to explain that the economy is in the toilet, Silicon Valley has a 12% unemployment rate, and for every job I interviewed for that were at least five better qualified candidates being considered.  (A survey by JuJu reported that San Jose is second easiest place to get a job with 2.5 people per advertised job, which suggest to me that someone was munching on magic mushrooms while crunching the numbers.)  When recruiters start to forget why the economy is in the toilet like clueless Wall Street bankers, that's something to worry about.

When the recruiter asked what I did with my free time, I told him that I was working on my novel.  From the sound of his voice, I think he drew a negative conclusion that I was a basket case and quickly ended the call.  With eight short stories, one essay and one poem accepted for publication, I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm a writer.  That's my real job even though rejection slips and contribution copies doesn't pay the bills.  My other job is supposed to pay the bills.  Unlike a lot of other unemployed workers, I'm not writing unemployment lit.  If I said "ceramics" instead of "writing," that might've been a safer answer.  Everyone understands ceramics.  Some people regard writing as a form of mental masturbation.

Surprisingly, no recruiter has mentioned technical writing as a job.  I'll never be a technical writer since that will suck the life out of being a fiction writer when I'm not at work.  When I spent six years as a video game tester, I stopped playing video games at home.  When I worked at The Old Spaghetti Factory for three years and had spaghetti for dinner every night, I didn't eat spaghetti for the next seven years.  Which is why I like desktop or help desk support jobs since it doesn't infringe on my personal life.  Some recruiters don't understand why I won't work more than 40 hours a week to make bucket loads of money.

My novel is one reason why I want to get back into a job.  I wrote two-third of a 700-page rough draft behind the steering wheel of my car during my one-hour lunch breaks.  When you have a regular spot at the same time everyday for writing, you can get a lot of stuff done.  I'm now revising four chapters per week for the second draft.  Having the discipline that comes from being behind the steering wheel would be a great help.  My wide open schedule from being unemployed doesn't make that discipline any easier.  As much as I love to write, revising can be a serious grind sometimes.  The one thing I'm not trying to do is finish, shop and sell my novel before my unemployment benefits run out for good.  The odds are long and I don't like the idea of being a starving artist.

I started studying for the Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP) to improve my job prospects.  I also picked up "C: All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies" by Dan Gookin to refresh my programming skills.  I took C++ for object-oriented programming in college but I never mastered the language.  PHP is the only language I continued to use after college for my website.   After I familiarize myself with C, I plan to study Objective-C (a programming language for the Mac that derived from C and influenced by Smalltalk) and iPhone development.  Combining an ACSP with Mac programming should open up many more job opportunities, especially if I end up at Apple.

Now I don't plan on developing iPhone applications (not yet because Apple requires a $99 per year fee for their developer program), which is a popular cottage industry for unemployed Silicon Valley workers.  I didn't have the resources to get in early on the iPhone apps craze a few years ago.  With Apple rumored to be announcing a new tablet computer and releasing iPhone 4.0 SDK next week, I'm waiting to see what the new features are to determine if I want to develop software for that platform.

What I'm looking for is niche potential to develop something that no one else has done before and/or very unique (e.g., Hawk Sketchbook #1 by the artist of AppleGeeks that just came out).  My Joomla! modules were developed because no one else had a module to pull pictures from a Twitter-based picture sharing website.  If you search for TwitPic, TwitGoo or TweetPhoto on the Joomla! Extensions Directory, the only photo sharing extensions you will find are mine.  I'm sensing an opportunity to expand my programming portfolio.

When you're unemployed, sometimes the best opportunities are the ones you make.

Updated 2010/01/22 @ 11:30AM - Silicon Valley now has an unemployment rate of 11.5 percent for December 2009.  The JuJu survery of 2.5 people per advertised job for San Jose is a mushroom-inspired fantasy.

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This week I got a post card in the mail for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series that will be accepting contest submissions for a collection of short stories (150+ pages) and poetry (50+ pages) between January 15, 2010 and March 15, 2010.  The entry fee is $25.  The grand prize is $3,000 and publication through the University of Nebraska Press.  I'm planning to enter my short story collection.  This is a strong motivator to polish off all my short stories from the last four years that are languishing in the slush piles.

If you search the Internet for how to put together a short story collection, you won't find much information.  Most articles start off with the caveat that publishers won't accept a short story collection unless you're a well established author, and even then somewhat reluctantly.  Surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal reported that short story collections are breaking out this year and e-readers might make short stories a viable form again.   I found this article and the arrival of postcard to be most encouraging for my own short story collection.

Since I had four short-short stories accepted for an anthology that I wrote after looking at the submission requirements two months ago, I started looking at the submission requirements of various anthologies and publications to match up with short story ideas that I thought up or recycling the ones that I started but never finished, and letting the deadlines determine my writing priorities for the next three months.

My first non-fiction essay, "The Cabbage Patch Fight," about how my mother got a Cabbage Patch doll for my baby niece by punching out two other mothers in a Toy R Us brawl in the early 1980's, was accepted for publication in a special Christmas issue of Soft Whispers Magazine.  I originally threw this story idea out on the Editor Unleashed Forums since I didn't think I had the time to write anything new when I got my hands full with revising my first novel and a short story with a submission due date at the end of the month.  The editor wanted the story and I found the time to write.  This became my fifth accepted story in the last two months and I have seven stories appearing in the next six months.

I'm going to be busy during the holidays.  I'm wrapping up and putting aside my first novel after cutting 30,000 words from the 125,000-word rough draft and splitting the novel in two volumes.  I got four short stories I'm writing to submit to different anthologies.  I write on average eight short stories a year but I'm on track to write 13 or 14 short stories this year.  I'm revising my 20,000-word vampire novella for submission to an ebook publisher.  The New Year will begin with me polishing off the 27+ short stories in my collection to submit to Prairie Schooner by March 2010, and working on the next draft of volume one of my first novel.

Maybe I should find time to look for a job since I been unemployed for the last nine months.  Rejection slips and contributor copies don't pay the bills.  Which is why I put a PayPal donation button my author website (scroll down to bottom right).  If you got some spare change, please help out a busy writer trying to get ahead financially.  The grand prize is still a long ways off.

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This week I received two contributor copies for my short story, "The World's Greatest Coffee," that appears in The MacGuffin (Fall 2009 / 25th Anniversary Issue).  This is my second published short story but the first one I have seen in print.   (My first published short story, "The Uninvited Spook," appeared in The Storyteller that paid a 1/4-cent per word and no contributor copy.)  I mailed one copy to my Dad since the idea of me being a writer has always been an intangible concept to him and my family.

When we got together for my birthday in August, and my brother asked what I do to keep myself occupied since being laid off in February, my Dad said "ceramics" before I could say anything.  Ceramics is something my family could immediately grasp, and, at the time, I was working on a big pot.  When I mentioned that I had finished writing the rough draft of a 700-page novel a few months earlier, the room was silent since they couldn't grasp what I said.

Writing to them is intangible until it appears in print in the local bookstores, on the New York Times best seller list, and lavished with praise by the Oprah Book Club on TV.  Even when I gave my Dad a copy of my short story collection in a binder, he was more interested in keeping the binder and tossing out the pages.  Maybe the new issue of The MacGuffin with my story (pages 68-70) and bio (pages 158-159) will convince him that I'm serious about being a writer.

Then again, maybe not.

This week has also been good for revising the 125,000-word rough draft of my first novel, a coming of age ghost story.  I started frequenting the Editors Unleashed forum, posted a question, and a suggestion was made that I split my novel into two volumes.  The ideal length for a first time novel should be about 80,000 to 100,000 words.  Anything longer or shorter may be a difficult sell.  From revising about 1/3 of my novel over the last month, it became obvious that keeping the manuscript under 100,000 words was going to be a difficult task even after I cut out 35,000 words.   I still got three notebooks of ideas that never made it into the rough draft.

After careful consideration and a late night of revising the novel structure on paper, I decided to split my novel into two 80,000-word volumes.  That fixes a big problem in the rough draft where the halfway point happens at the two-third mark, something that would be painful to fix if the word count was less than 100,000 words.  The first volume is strong and complete.  The second volume is weak and underdeveloped.  The overall structure is now clearer since I have room to run with the story.

Would selling a duology (two books) be any easier than selling a single, longer book?

I'm not sure, and, to a certain extent, I really don't care while revising my work.  Something I'll worry about next year when I start shopping the first volume and polishing the second volume.  However, since my novel will fit into the Urban Fantasy market niche, a duology shouldn't be a problem.  Ultimately, I think an agent and/or an editor will have to decide how many volumes my novel should be.

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