The psychic payments filed as business expenses

Twelve hundred dollars. That was the first payment, early in the nineties, from a romance novelist to a psychic in New York City.

By the end, according to the account Reader’s Digest later pieced together, the fee had become $1 million a year, flat.

My own first payment is in a desk drawer in Charleston. It was a lot smaller, and I remember feeling very sensible about it.

•••

The novelist was Jude Deveraux, whose books have sold some 60 million copies. Before the psychic came along, there were four properties in Santa Fe and an apartment in New York.

The apartment was sold, and the proceeds went to the psychic. Prosecutors put the total at about $17 million over roughly twenty years, and in September 2013 a federal jury convicted Rose Marks on all 14 counts.

Here’s the detail that stopped me. Before the trial, the ABA Journal reported that the novelist’s accountant had listed the payments to Marks as business expenses on the tax returns. Guess what the waiting had turned into? A line item.

Why nobody audits the waiting

Here’s the part almost nobody talks about. The big frauds make the news because of the number. The Overhead never makes the news, because it’s paid in decisions nobody else sees: the application you didn’t send in March because a reader said something might shift by summer.

“But I’d never hand anyone a million dollars.”

Nobody starts there. This one started at $1,200. The Overhead doesn’t arrive as a big number. It arrives as a reasonable one, and then it stays.

Am I telling you never to book a reading? I’d be a hypocrite in a purple shawl. I’ve read cards for eleven years, and I tell every client the same thing: I can tell you what you’re feeling, I can’t tell you what he’s deciding.

I paid the Overhead myself. Five times a date came and went, and five times I bought another reading instead of asking what the last one had cost me. The one I trusted most said April, so I turned down a job in Savannah that spring.

Rosalind was the one who finally said it: “He’s not coming, honey, and frankly you’ve gotten boring.” I didn’t speak to Rosalind for a month. The second part stung worse, because it was about my life, and my life had stopped doing anything.

Behavior Over Time is the only instrument I trust, and it reads you too. You can’t audit his heart from your couch. You can audit your own last twelve months: what you applied for, what you asked for, what you said no to and why.

Taking your work back is not a verdict on the connection. It’s a refusal to keep paying overhead on a decision that belongs to someone else. Whichever way this goes, you’ll want work that kept moving, and release, if that’s where it lands, is a full outcome, not a consolation prize.

•	List every work decision from the past year that you delayed until this resolved.
•	Next to each one, write the date or the reading it was waiting on.
•	Circle the one you’d most want back.
•	Do one small piece of it before Monday: one email, one form, one phone call.

01	Which work decision this year did you hand to somebody else’s calendar?

02	What would you ask for at work if no reader had ever given you a month?

03	What does an ordinary month of waiting cost you, counted honestly?

Venus is retrograde until November 13. Your inbox is not.

Whatever he decides, the next hour of your workday has your name on it. Use it like it’s yours.