Splah! Well. The RMFW contest at least *received* my stuff, presumably in time, although the postcard is postdated the 8th, but one assumes the nice lady didn’t rush out the instant the materials were received and stick it back in the box. There’s no note on it saying, “You suck! Got here too late!” or, “You suck! We already have our 200 entries and nobody else gets to enter!”
Not that this means much, but at least it doesn’t *say* that. :)
I just went and re-read the rules for the RMFW contest, and they take the top 6 point-gathering submissions (minimum of 100 points out of 120 possible) from each of the four genres (general fiction, mysteries, sf, and romance) and an acquiring agent/editor reads them to determine the winner. So all other things being equal (like assuming everything got there in time and there weren’t too many other submissions), an entry has about a 1 in 8 (point three, if you’re being picky) chance of being read by somebody relevant. That’s really good. Neat!
In other news, a nice lady named Ms. Harris at the IRS confirmed that this bill I got a few days ago means they did not, in fact, receive the online payment I made last month, despite the fact that the site I used to make the payment says it was made, and the checking account shows the withdrawal having been made. I can’t get ahold of a live person at the customer service line at officialpayments.com, which doesn’t make me very happy, but I’ll try again tomorrow. Ms. Harris also helped me set up payments for this year’s taxes due. I hate money.
Let’s see. What else? Not much else. Um. Oh! The chiro told me I should exercise (boy, THERE’S a news flash) and so I really should try to go to bed early tonight so I can get up and go swim in the morning, since it’s Thursday and my gym pass is no good for Thursdays. And, um, um, um. I feel like there’s a lot more I’m forgetting to say, even besides the fact that I haven’t written up the Great Glacier Hike yet. I need to email A.C. Crispin and ask her if I can send her a synopsis for a Starbridge novel idea. Of course, it’s possible I should first *write* the synopsis… futher futher futher! I am all futhery!
And I can’t figure out what art classes to take this fall! Fnrt!
Fingers and toes and everything crossed!
If you and Ted file joint, and your SSNs are listed in one order on the return and in a different order on the payment (I’m assuming they had you list SSNs through the online service), then the IRS may not associate the two with each other. This happened to me the first time I filed joint; the IRS sent me a Terrifying Letter and I got to talk to one of their reps on the phone and had her look under the husband’s SSN. They had credited our payment for joint taxes to his ssn for single taxes despite the lack of a filing single return to go with this mysterious large check. :) I checked around and apparently it’s relatively common; you might check and see if they have your payment credited under the wrong SSN. Oh! And have a copy of the cancelled check on hand when you can get it; that helps a bit.