Saturday I finally sat down and got our taxes done.
It didn’t come back too badly, which is good – the money we’re getting
back from the state will cover what we owe to the feds, so all balanced
there. And my publishing business actually made a small profit this year
– the first year it’s actually done so! We’re talking very small – $143
small, but it’s a number “in the black” and that’s all I care about at
this point because I’ve taken a loss for the past three years. The
government tends to frown on businesses taking a loss more than 3 yrs in
a row, so that tiny profit is pretty significant as far as intent and
growth goes. I’m rather proud of it.  

Naturally
there was more money than that coming in over the year, but that was
the pure profit part – everything else went back into the business. As
it should this early on. And my sales seem to be growing this year, so
hopefully I’ll have a little more profit to report for 2013.

Last
week I spent a good deal of my free time checking out task/project
management software. Free, paid, complex, simplistic…I think I
reorganized my life a good five times just trying out the options to see
if they’d work for me. Organizational software and task lists are so
personal, and it’s impossible to know what will fit your personality
until you actually try using them for a few days. 

By
Friday, I’d pretty much resigned myself to the most expensive, robust
software package I’d been trying, because nothing else had the main
features I really wanted, including a good Android widget that
automatically created the daily task lists based on other project lists
with assigned due dates, and organized those lists by due date. This is
something I’ve been doing by hand every morning, and having that
automatically generated will save me a lot of time and brain power in
the mornings when I need it most. 

Then a friend posted the link for Wunderlist
on Facebook, and I decided to give it a quick try out. It doesn’t have
nearly as many features as the expensive package I was trialling, but it
has plenty to get the job done, it runs on all platforms as well as
offline, *and* it’s completely free. Within five minutes, I knew I could
make it work, and honestly, I’d pay for it if they wanted me to. I
spent a good deal of time reorganizing my life one last time with
Wunderlist, and I finally feel like I’ve got a solution that will work
for a good long time. It will even replace my shopping list app (which
made more of those changes I hate, I realized rather inconveniently on
Sunday morning just before a trip to the grocery store). 

Getting
everything organized, including my writing projects and publishing
schedule, went a long way this weekend toward making me feel more in
control, even with all the changes happening around me. And that allows
me to stay calmer even when life is trying its hardest to stress me
out. 

So what’s on this week’s list? Let’s see *checks Wunderlist*: 

– Scenes for 5 drafts

– Start revisions on horror novella

– Formatting & launch for Sleep With Me

– Business bookkeeping for March

– Budgeting/accounting for the household (switching to new pay schedule at the day job this month)

– Workout x3

And that will be plenty, methinks. Here’s to a swift and productive week, eh?

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Romantic Suspense
| Erotic Romance | Suspense/Thriller 
| Flash Fiction | Non-Fiction

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