I saw my tax guy today and got the news. The good news is Ii don't owe much tax, In fact I owe more to my accountant than to the Feds. the bad news, of corse, is hat I made so little money last year and that's why I owe so little tax. It's not that I'm not writing. I's just that I'm not selling.

i'm like Baujtista; I'm having a dry spell. I hope his doesn't last as long as mine has.

I'm still not daunted, not totally. As a writer I have been trained all my life to tolerate delayed gratification. I just hope it's not too delayed this time round. I may be short of time. I am not short of paper. I just ordered more. I don't buy green bananas but I still buy a whole box of copy paper (white) plus a package each of pink yellow and blue, for second third and fourth drafts. The paperless society may work for other people but not for writers. We not only use a lot, we love it a lot, too. And use it. And save it.

I remember the American writer Joan Didion once compared the little bits of writing that she saved on stray bits of paper to string. You save it and store it/wrap it until you have a ball of it (string) - and then what?

I don't know. None of it is deathless, none of it means anything to anyone but me. Yet I save it Perhaps I'll tell myself something I needed to know. The University Of Manitoba Archives houses my files, tear sheets, early drafts, correspondence and so on. No balls of string though. I wonder if I could sell them? Then I'd have to pay more tax.

I have just finished gathering and collating my papers for presentation to my tax accountant in the morning. It's hard work for me; I'm not a numbers person. I like words, as you might have guessed. The interesting thing for me was reliving 2016. The time was so packed that last spring seems longer ago than a mere year. It's another milestone. I used to wonder what I'd do without deadlines or milestones but they never seem to stop so neither do I.

I play another game you might be familiar with: what have you learned? What have you learned since you were 60 (older?)? What have you learned this week? What did you learn today? Oh dear. If I confess to you what I learned today, promise not to laugh. I finally learned the value of the program called MINT. I poked at it kind of half-heartedly over the last year, missing two or three months entirely. But today I found it useful to find transactions quickly. I promised myself that I would not fail to report to MINT regularly.

So that's good.