Its been a year
since I wrote Death Race against the Patriarchy, my first official
novel. Honestly I had meant to start a new by now, but I a few
detours and curves along the way got me off track.
For now I’ll
give an overview of the issues and steps I went through. Call it a
self review if you will.
To NaNo or not to
NaNo.
http://nanowrimo.org/
Death Race
against the Patriarchy was written as a lark as part of the National
Novel in a Month...contest? It’s not really a contest, its a more
of a self-help motivational tool, with goals and emotional incentives
to keep you writing. While it most definitely got me writing, doing
50,000 words in a single month, one must realize the rewards for
completion are intangible and not meant to be actual rewards. But this certainly is not an attack on NaNo, as it is a great at promoting literacy and writing. Upon
completion of NaNo in 2015, I was treated with a PDF certificate of
completion, not really something you can put on the wall or in your
resume, but why not. There was also a bunch of discounts for various
writing related services. As fall is when my income dips the most, I
could only afford one of them, and decided on a publishing service.
Fastpencil, so it begins
 |
| YEP |
So my pick of
coupons was Fastpencil, a self publishing service that offers world
wide distribution of electronic and printed works, with clear focus
on the former. Their normal cost was/is a pretty steep at $275, but
my coupon granted me use of it for $75, so I brought in. I had no
idea of how big or effective Fastpenicl was at the time, and like an
goofball following a motivational poster from twitter or the net, I gave
into impulse and jumped right in.
The first rule of publishing club...
...is that things
are never as easy as you think. The second rule is that a small buy
in always becomes a bigger buy in later on. So as I readied to press
the “finish your publication” button, I suddenly realized
something was wrong. I noticed that I needed to submit an IRS form
to Fastpenicl. So I did, but later realized something was quite
wrong with that as well. I am Canadian, not a US citizen. There
wasn’t much on Fastpenicl on how to go about the process. Trying
to contact them was fruitless. But I finally figured out that I
needed to fill out a different form before submitting the first form
(which I had already mistakenly submitted) and than put that all on
the electronic form under my profile. Easy.
The quest for the ITIN begins
So what I needed
was an individual tax identification number as a non-resident alien
so I could take advantage of the treaty rights between Canada and the
U.S. that allowed me to avoid the withholding tax of 30%. Kind of
looks like Star Trek Techno-babble, and certainly it felt like at the
time. So off to the IRS website for some forms, which I had to find
for myself. Oddly the form and information on it seemed straight
forward, which should have been my first indication everything was
fated to go belly up later on. But in an effort to save some money
and confident in my skills to figure things out, I set out to do it
on my own.
The most expensive photocopy...
So one of the
things I needed for for my ITIN submission was a certified passport
as proof of residency. I haven’t had a passport in decades, so I
needed to get one. This took a bit of time, but it soon arrived and
back to the immigration office to get my certified copy. Now its one
thing to send all my passport submission stuff way down east (from my
perspective here in western Canada) to the official offices and wait
three weeks to get it done. It’s an entirely different thing to
send it back down east to the same office and wait another three
weeks for an official certified copy. It’s also quite insane to
have this process cost nearly as much as the original passport. So
when my passport and its certified copies came back in a thin plain
envelope causally thrown half ways into my mailbox I certainly needed
a “drink-drink” as my grandma would have called it. When I saw
my $45 certified copy was a poor quality copy that looked like it was
done on a first gen inkjet printer half out of ink and all that was
special about it was raised watermark stamp and an obviously form
letter signature, I had a couple of extra drink-drinks.
STOP! In the name of law!
So finally I had
all I needed, and sent my application for an ITIN down east again,
but this time south of the border. Now for those of you who think
that the paperless digital age is at hand, realize that the IRS, at
least on this front is old school. No digital submissions or
replies, snail mail baby in a big unfolded envelopes. Round trip was
an estimated 6-8 weeks state side, so I figured 10-12 for me.
Unfortunately I was out of time and had to submit my project to get
my coupon savings, I would have to take tax hit on any sales. I
wasn’t really expecting that many sales to be honest though, it was
the principle of the thing.
So considering I
finished my book in around November of 2015 and started the
Fastpenicl stuff in December, It was around March 2016 that I got my
IRS rejection letter. Looking through what I thought where the easy
to use IRS instructions, I honestly couldn’t figure out what I did
wrong. So I made a fateful call.
This is the IRS,
what the hell do you want!
I just assume "Richard" was actually Ben researching his role.
So I called the
IRS and talked to...Richard? Honestly I can’t remember his name
offhand, but let’s call him Richard for ease of use and to protect
myself from his wraith. If your Canadian and
have to deal with the CRA (our IRS), you’ll know that they can be
to the point, but generally are well mannered and trained in customer
relations. Richard was not. I remember when he first answered the
phone, “Internal Revenue Service, what do you want?” Loud,
aggressive, and kind of scary. I was taken a back and tried to
satiate his fury by meekly asking if he could this poor Canadian.
His demeanour didn’t change, but told me what I was missing. First
I needed a note from Fastpencil, which hit me as kind of weird as this means that you could not get one if you are a self starter. I knew that getting a timely response from Fastpenicl was going to be an issue. But Richard assured me that if I dropped Fastpencil a line and said that the IRS said it had to get done, that it would get done. So I contacted Fastpencil through Twitter....and the letter got done nearly instantly. The second thing Richard told me was puzzling. They preferred colored certified copies of the Passport...which the Canadian passport peoples didn't even offer me and pretty sure I hadn't seen this requirement in the IRS ITIN FAQ. So, what the heck could I do?
Continued in part 2.
