This is the first year I haven’t done my own taxes. Given a stack of receipts from various writerly and less writerly expenses, the fact that I donated away most of my stuff when I moved to L.A., and a pile of 1090s from nine different employers over the course of the year, I figured the time had come to pay someone else to deal. I knew that I hadn’t paid in as much in as normal, since most of the work I did this year was contract labor. I was expecting to owe, rather than to get a refund. So I was disappointed, but not surprised, when my tax preparer’s initial report was that I would need to pay about a thousand dollars on my federal claim. D’oh.

But I didn’t know all the things I could claim when I was saving receipts this year. Fortunately, after that first consultation, I was able to comb through last year’s bank statements and find a lot more things I could claim as expenses. This morning I found out that my actual amount due is going to be around $60, and the state of California will give me about $20 back. Phew. Muuuuuuuch better.

The point of the story is that it pays to know what you can claim as a writer. Here are some of the qualified expenses/deductions I learned or had reaffirmed this year:

• photocopies of scripts (mine or other people’s)
• cable television
• movie ticket stubs
• subscriptions to trades and entertainment-related magazines
• Netflix
• travel to special places to write
• travel to writers groups

And of course the office supplies, the classes and workshops, the business lunches, etc. (He says as if he took a lot of business lunches…)  All the normal stuff. Plus, you can count your expenses when you do a cross-country move for a job.

Now I know. And knowing, as G.I. Joe taught me, is half the battle. The other half, of course, is killing people.

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