That time of year

Sorry for the blog silence lately. It’s that dreaded time of year again. Not spring – spring is great! The trees here are starting to bloom and cute furry animals are coming out of their holes (I may have squealed when I saw a groundhog popping up along the side of the road today. Groundhogs remind me of really chubby ferrets and as I used to have six ferrets – may they rest in peace – I love them). So what dreaded time of year is it, then? Tax season.

With our move out of state plus self-pubbed stories adding more paperwork to my usual slog through receipts and bank statements trying to separate business write offs from personal stuff, I’ve been buried in paperwork. Also, my fear of the IRS makes me double and triple check everything before I send the whole bundle off to our accountant, who will then make readable spreadsheets out of my mess and tell me what I have to render unto Caesar.  Yes, I know, if I were more organized throughout the year, I wouldn’t go through this every end of March. Getting better organized is on my To Do list. So is exercising. Start placing your bets on which of these is least likely to get done! Heh.

On top of this – and writing, of course – I wanted to bring a fun giveaway item to the conventions I’ll be attending this year and thought I had the perfect idea: Match boxes with Once Burned’s cover on the front and a little note from Vlad inside them! Considering Vlad’s pyrokinesis, I thought it would be neat to have matches personalized for his book’s release. Well, I thought wrong. First, getting a full color image customized onto match boxes is ridiculously expensive, so then I looked at having matches with only customized writing on the boxes. A little better in price, but minimum orders ran into the thousands. I won’t see that many people this year and I can’t mail the matches to readers because it’s illegal to send solid flammables through the US mail. Scratch the matches idea. However, my friend and fellow author Melissa Marr gave me another idea for fun, free trinkets for readers. If all goes well, I’ll have them at the Romantic Times convention next month. Not saying what these are yet because I don’t know if they’ll work out or if they’ll arrive in time, so stay tuned. If nothing else, I’ll have a bunch of book marks to give away to readers at RT, and hopefully something more for readers at the Authors After Dark convention.

Well, back to final tax preparations and writing! Hope everyone is having a nice week so far.