Taxing times

Seasonal Affective Disorder, or the financial year blues?  You might think of it as the winter woes, but I refer to it as Tax Fright.

Call it what you will.  Many people find this time of year quite difficult.  Not just because the weather is colder, or because it gets dark earlier, or even because the days are a bit shorter.  (Although if you do have SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder – then all these things could certainly lower your mood.)

No, this time of year is when you pull out all those receipts you’ve been dutifully saving, and prepare yourself for the Sisyphean toil – the ‘endless, heart breaking’ job – of the tax return.  For me, it’s the hurdle that I don’t look forward to leaping over, particularly as I prepare to justify all the time I’ve spent on an activity that earns negligible income, but which makes life feel worthwhile.

Whether it’s writing or painting, it’s a source of conflict for anyone pursuing any sort of creative or artistic pursuit;  the lack of remuneration versus the satisfaction it brings.  Like most people who choose this lifestyle, I therefore have a ‘day job’ (or actually, a weekend job) that allows me to pursue my real ambitions.

Trying to explain that to my Accountant is another matter.  When he looks at me in disbelief and measures the couple of hundred dollars of (writing) income against all the outgoings in this financial year, I know he’ll need a ladder to get down from that very high horse as he sits there telling me what I already know.

Writers earn very little from book sales, even the more famous names out there.  The only difference is that their sales are in the tens of thousands, while the new kids on the block will be lucky to clear a couple of hundred.  I earn just over a dollar for each book I sell.  I spent 2016 writing almost full-time, with only a paid weekend job to sustain me.  To print my book costs about $19 – more than the usual cost because it contains so many colour images.  Irrespective of the sale price listed at the various online sites, I still only receive just over a dollar a book.  The sites receive any additional profit.  My books are printed ‘on-demand’ which means they only get printed when someone places an order.  Everyone, it seems, gets more money out of this venture than myself.

So it may look good to have a book listed in Amazon, but don’t be fooled.  It doesn’t mean you’re suddenly earning a bucket of money.

Give it away, my Accountant said glibly during our consultation, missing the point entirely about why a person feels the need to do anything creative in the first place.  It’s soul food.  I think, I feel, I write.  It’s the way I make sense of my world.

And that’s not the only part of my world that he deconstructed.   Apparently I’m not contributing nearly enough to the various funds that will sustain me in future years, nor will I ever aspire to a more grand style of accommodation on such a low income.   Consigned to an austere lifestyle with most hedonistic pursuits simply out of reach to the lowly writer, I can almost see the fingerless gloves and my shadowy figure crouched over the candleflames, trying to warm her hands.   Or have I read too much Dickens?

Why then, dear Reader, do I pursue such a thankless task?  Why continue to put myself in this precarious position?  Well, imagine for a moment that you’re told to relinquish the very thing that brings you the greatest pleasure or sense of achievement.   Go on, sit with that thought for a moment.  What would it be?  Let yourself feel it.

Imagine the sort of anguish that would bring on a daily basis, how it would pervade your life.  Then you might be in the vicinity of how I feel about being told to give up my writing ambitions.

Anyway, the numbers have been tallied now, the tax return has been estimated.  Never good news.  But at least it’s done; and I have no intention of hanging up my pen yet.

So that brings me back to the weather, and a reminder that these wintery dark mornings are on their way out.  We’re officially over the hump, we’ve passed the shortest day, and Spring is only weeks away.  If that doesn’t cheer you, then perhaps you do need some light therapy and a dose of melatonin.

Personally I prefer to put my trust in nature at this time of year, specifically in its thoughtful provision of snow and all the joyful associations that brings for me.   Magical, fluttery, delicate white flakes falling from the skies; falling in hallowed silence like heaven’s confetti.  A nice way to balance out all the mid-year angst.  Surely that alone was designed to cheer us up in these colder months?   Well, only if you can be bothered to get up at 5am, drive for a few hours, and spend the day in very unattractive thermals, and the sort of knitted hats that remodel your hair into the antithesis of the fluffy Donald Trump meringue by the end of the day.  I love the snow – not so much the 5am wake-up call.  But I resent the way my hat makes my hair look welded to my scalp by the end of the day.  Very unattractive.

Like Benjamin Franklin said, you can count on death and taxes.  He had bad hair too, and he had obviously never had the pleasure of a puffy jacket.

Anyway, if you can motivate yourself to leave your bed early and slither about in one of nature’s most glorious creations (with or without skis) then you might just kick start yourself out of that torpid winter gloom.  Go on, cold be damned.  Get out there and make some Snow Angels.  It’s the most fun you can ever hope to have in zero degrees.