This post contains an actual image of me doing my taxes

One unexpected difficulty of self-publishing is that taxes aren't as simple as they are with an ordinary W-2. Royalty income is weird. I got something called a 1099-MISC from Amazon, so that's what I was plowing through this weekend. Or at least trying to plow through.

Above, Marvin can been seen struggling as he gazes at many, many boxes filled with numbers of unknown origin and destination.

I think I did it right, but only time will tell. I'm not going to be getting an Al Capone FBI squad regardless of how badly I screwed up (because let's face it, the FBI couldn't even fill up the gas tanks of their SWAT vans with my miserly tax payment), but hopefully it goes through smoothly and I don't have to spend any more weekends working on this.

Progress Report:

Still working on the end of my book 3 draft. I'm just over 116,000 words in, with a few placeholders earlier in the book that I need to flesh out. 2-4 chapters left depending on how I cut what remains (Yes, I said 5 before. I added a few chapters.) Progress has slowed down a bit, partially because I'm also doing a bit of editing and partially because the first few chapters and last few chapters always take me the longest.

I'm hoping I'll polish that up by next week and be able to send the book out to alpha readers while I work on more editing. I may also recruit beta readers to comb through the book after the alphareaders are done with it. It might be nice to get a few more eyes on it, though the major structure changes will be set by that point. Somebody mentioned in a comment a few chapters back that another writer they followed recruited beta readers to comb for typos? That might be useful to further my goal of releasing cleaner work right from publication. Let me know if any of you would like to volunteer. I don't know what I can give out in return. Job recommendations maybe?

Thanks for reading!

-Marvin