6000 Posts!

Is that enough to claim I am really a writer?

Originally published by CleanTechnica.

Credit: Steve Hanley for CleanTechnica. All rights reserved

A little while ago, I noticed there is a counter in the lower left corner of all posts on CleanTechnica that shows how many articles the author has contributed. As of the this morning, that tracker showed I had 5999 posts to my credit. This will be number 6000. Wow! As the Grateful Dead might say, “What a long, strange trip its been.”

It began when I was in the 6th grade in a small elementary school in a bedroom community in Rhode Island. For reasons lost in the dim mists of time, I decided that year to write a story. It was an adventurous tale involving nefarious actors who were building a base off the east coast of America and the forces of good who were working to uncover their nefarious plot and put an end to it. I think it began as a writing assignment as part of an English lesson. My teacher seemed to think it was pretty good (for a sixth grader) and she asked me to read it aloud. My classmates also appreciated it and asked me to finish the story. Over the next several weeks, I stayed up late at night with a pad of paper and a pencil, trying to flesh out the story, but I couldn’t figure out how to end it. Pretty soon everyone lost interest in it, including me.

That summer, the decision was made to pull me out of public school and pack me off to an exclusive prep school run by the Society of Friends in Providence. The principal objective for the next five years was for me to get accepted into an Ivy League college so I could become a successful doctor, or failing that, a lawyer. Calculus proved to be the end of my med school dreams, which left law school as the only alternative.

I have always been a gearhead who was fascinated by cars, racing, and motorcycles. I devoured every issue of Road & Track, Car and Driver, and Cycle World I could find and dreamed of becoming a famous automotive journalist. I wrote a few articles for those publications and sent them off to the editors of the various magazines. They all thanked me for my submissions but said my articles were not quite what they were looking for. After I bought my first motorcycle — a green Honda 350 — I was inspired to write an article about the joys of being on two wheels and taking road trips throughout southern New England. I spent an entire summer writing it on a yellow pad. When I was done, it was a welter of crossouts and lines showing where certain sentences or paragraphs should be deleted or moved to. After all the editing was done, I sent it off to the local newspaper, which agreed to make it the cover story of the Sunday magazine. I was elated. I was finally a published author! I think I got paid $50 for the piece, which made my time worth about 10 cents an hour.

The Next Step

After that, the curtain fell and time passed. The word processor replaced the yellow pad and there was this new thing called WordPress that let people publish articles that looked just like the ones you see in magazines. My wife and I went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant one night and the message in my fortune cookie said, “Do not be afraid to take the next big step.” I took it home and taped it to the screen of my computer. A few weeks later, I heard about an online course that taught people how to use WordPress. I had a feeling it was the next big step my fortune was talking about, so I signed up for the class. Soon I had my own blog and was spending entirely too much time online.

Then I stumbled on a site called Gas2, which was covering the transition to electric cars. I became a regular reader and got to know the editor through the comments section. One day on a whim, I sent him an email to ask if he was looking for new writers. As it turned out, he was. Suddenly, I was a regular contributor and getting paid $10 an article to write forty 300-word articles a month. I thought I had died and gone to heaven! I was getting paid $400 a month to sit home and write articles about one of my favorite topics — cars. No inquiry letters. No rejection letters 6 months later. No office overhead except for an internet connection. How great was that?

It turned out the company that owned Gas2 also had a number of other blogs that dealt with green living and the circular economy, so I started writing for them as well. But the crown jewel of the company was a blog called CleanTechnica. I got in touch with the editor but he told me he wasn’t looking for new writers. A fellow in Germany saw my stuff and asked me to write for his blog and I also hooked up with a new site called Teslarati. Then, one day, the editor of Gas2 was gone and I became the only one running the site. Eventually, Zachary Shahan started republishing some of my stories at CleanTechnica. After a while, he became convinced I was not a buffoon and knew my way around a keyboard, so he invited me to become a regular writer. That was 5999 posts ago, and today here I am, typing my 6000th story for CleanTechnica. [Editor’s note: Full disclosure: Steve is my favorite writer on the web. Or at least as far as I can name or remember. I’ve also read some really great stuff at The New Yorker and various other places from time to time, but Steve is most likely my consistent #1. —Zach]

On The Road To 6000 Posts

Over the past dozen years, I have published stories from a seaside hotel in Maine, from the deck of a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, at a cafe on the shores of Lake Como, and from beside a rooftop pool in the delightful town of Manly, Australia. What started as a side hustle has become a focal point of my life. I write every day, seven days a week, not because I need the money (although I do cash the checks), but because I enjoy it and because it keeps my brain actively engaged in the world around me. I have learned so much from writing, things I would never have known otherwise. One of the biggest rewards from this gig is the friends I have made with readers all across the US and Canada as well as Europe and Australia. I treasure everyone who has let me infiltrate their computers and smartphones with my thoughts, fulminations, and occasional rants. I am enormously grateful to Zachary, who has given me the freedom to say what is on my mind without editorial constraints. For a writer, that is a rare gift, one that I value beyond measure.

I still harbor a desire to write the great American novel; perhaps someday I will. But every moment we spend doing one thing is a moment we cannot be doing something else. I have to ask myself whether it would be worth my while to take 6 months to a year off to write a book that might sell a few dozen copies. So far, the answer has been no. So, tomorrow I will begin the next phase of my adventure here at CleanTechnica. I hope you will join me so we can make the journey together.