I did fairly well in math in school, I took AP biology in high school and passed. I scraped by my bio classes in college, did much better at geology, but I'll never be a scientist or a mathematician.
When I read legal or business language like in a contract or my insurance paperwork, my brain turns to static. Seriously, it's like it forgot how to exist.
Signal lost, end of the day's programming, super black hole.
To make matters worse, it's not just when I read it or hear it (sorry insurance lady who comes to work every year to explain our benefits, I didn't catch any of that), even thinking about it causes brain melt.
Why is this on a blog about writing and books and stuff?
Do you know how much legal/business stuff authors have to deal with? Especially self-published authors? I thought I knew.
I didn't.
I went to a workshop on tax info for authors at the last Nebraska Writers Guild spring conference. It was great, very informative, and gave me the illusion that I could easily handle the business side of this business.
Guys, I am so out of my league.
I started working on getting a tax id number. I didn't make it past the first page.
I figured I should get the handout the gentleman who ran the class gave us so I would have a guide through the process. The more I looked at it, the more static happened in my brain. There were numbers and percentages and form names and stuff. My brain shut down after overheating and hulksmashing the table.
The problem is, I think I have a fairly decent understanding of the pieces and parts of the whole giving the government it's cut thing, but when I try processing the entire thing is where I run into trouble.
I'll keep plugging away at it, chipping away at the little bits until the whole thing comes together... because it's figure it out or go to jail, I guess??
Thankfully, in my line of work, being overly right-brained is a good thing. In the meantime, I'm going to call the man who has all the answers to life's mysteries.
DAD!!
