“For every £100 I’m paid, £30 isn’t mine.”

Over on MoneySaving Expert (MSE) Martin Lewis has a piece about how freelancers and the self-employed need to remember about Tax, and save it away rather than treating it as ‘just another bill when it comes in’.

It’s a really good point – and it’s something that does need to be remembered. That ‘bill’ can easily run into thousands, and cause real hardships and issues. Just think, if you’ve earned £10,000 in the year then it can be a £3,000 bill. Earn £35,000, and it’s a £10,500 bill. Scary amounts, scarily quickly.  And if you’re VAT registered, that can be another chunk.

Every time you get paid, put 30% of it into another account, ‘the taxman’s account’, and don’t touch it. As Lewis says, it’s not your money, it’s the taxman’s. Don’t even think of it as ‘my money’ – otherwise you’ll be tempted to use it ‘on a rainy day’. Keep it separate, and pay the bill when it comes.

It’s something I’ll need to remember as time goes on, whether for work or for writing  – and even more so when/if my writing becomes my work (oh please, oh please) – so I figure it’s best to put it here now, and remember it every day/week/month/year.

Surprisingly, it’s not being mentioned or promoted by CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection bunch of muppets Centre. Not a thing.

Wouldn’t you think that – if CEOP were actually any fucking use at all – they’d support and cross-promote this Safer Internet Day? Or even have created the concept themselves.

So when it came to restarting, I was wondering what I should do in order to look at publishing.

Getting an agent is usually the recommended way of going – and in time I’ll probably look into that more seriously. But equally, I don’t really want to sit in the ‘slush’ pile of an agent or publisher for [x] months/years. So I think it’s going to be worth trying out the self-publishing route via Amazon and their Kindle Direct Publishing program(me).

I might be jumping the gun somewhat, but I’ve registered with the KDP programme, and I’m going to see how I go. It’s also a good motivator for getting some stuff written and thrown out into The World. If it works out, then that’s grand. and if it doesn’t, well, I’ll see how I go.

In fact the only thing I can currently see as a minor downside is that KDP wants/prefers manuscripts to be done in Word’s .doc format. And I was hoping to use CeltX, a writing application I love. Still, it’s not a big thing, just a bit of a pain in the bits. Fortunately, I haven’t gone too far down the line with the first writing piece yet, so I can move it into Word / OpenOffice, and create a .doc from there.

And then we’ll just see how things go from there…

The original idea was to have the site as a diary of the main protagonist, Kit Midst, and to form a whole story out of the posts.

It was a nice idea, one I really liked when I first had it, but it never really sparked as a blog / diary idea. I really liked the ideas that were in a couple of the posts ‘by Kit’, but it didn’t gel as a whole.

Kit Midst is a character I still want to use, and intend to. But it’s not going to be on that blog, nor is the next idea going to be any form of journal.

I’ll write more here about it as I go on, but for now, well, Kit Midst is still a plan, but the blog site isn’t.

1. When may you call yourself a writer?
2. When may you call yourself a professional writer?
3. When may you call yourself a good writer?

It’s a good piece, and well worth the read.

First, well, my name gets shortened to Al, and I’m not exactly slim. So – Fat Al.

Second, I love word-games, and it amused me that Fat Al can also be Fatal – particularly when most of my writing ideas are around crime, mystery and a body-count.

Third? It was available, when I looked.

And who needs any more reasons than that, really?

One of the main bits of wisdom about writing is that you can’t properly call yourself a writer until you’ve actually completed something. In that context, it depends on what phase of life I’m looking at.

Many years ago, I completed two novel-length books, and a whole bundle of short stories.

But in this phase of life, I’m starting out from scratch. I’ve got ideas, but I’ve got nothing completed.

So – if I’m not a writer, I’m at least an aspiring writer.

Some of the thoughts and ideas I have will get written – or at least talked about – here. Some will get put straight into the writing I plan to do.

In short, all this is a work in progress. And Fat Al is the home of that work.