When people ask me what I do to keep busy in early retirement, I almost never mention writing MrFireStation.com.  I guess that’s odd, given that I created the site more than three years ago and have now posted over 400 articles.  Even though I probably spend about 2 hours a week writing and updating the site, I haven’t ever actually considered myself a ‘writer’.

Sometimes people will say I’m a good writer, but I figure they are just being nice.  I didn’t get especially good grades in English classes and I don’t know grammatical rules very well (even enough to know which ones I am breaking).  A friend’s wife helped edit a post for me a couple years ago and I was surprised at how many simple mistakes I had made.  She turned around the structure of about a dozen of my sentences and they all sounded a lot better.  Since ignorance is bliss, I’ve never asked for anyone to help edit a post since!

I used to publish articles three times a week, but backed it down to 2x a week after I stopped working.  I’ve found I actually have LESS time and LESS interesting things to say now that I don’t have a job to go to or MegaCorp to complain about anymore.  Still, I am pleased to see that thousands of people come to the site each week (or subscribe) and want to read new articles (my original goal was to get just 100 readers to the site).

When my wife and I were on vacation recently, I stopped in a store to get a quick picture.  For security reasons, she wondered if I was ‘allowed’ to do that since it was a Duty Free Shop in an airport.  I said, “If they ask, I will simply explain that I am a free-lance writer and that I am authoring an article.” 

After I said it, I kind of liked the sound of it.  With 400 posts under my belt, I guess I need to start giving myself more credit for being a writer.  I’m not getting paid, but I do get thousands of readers.

Maybe if I write more travel posts I can even start writing travel expenses off my taxes as an occupational expense!

Image Credit: Pixabay