I’ve Been Blogging Since 2006. I Only Just Figured Out What It Was For

 How decades of creative inventory became my retirement income experiment

At least I remembered to hit Save Post. Probably.

(Or: How a Married Men's Magazine, a Pet Rock, and a Rogue AI Concierge Built My Retirement Plan)

Let me tell you about February 2007.

I published a blog post on Honk'n'Holl'r — my humor blog, which has been running since 2006 and which I maintain with the kind of commitment most people reserve for flossing — about a magazine for married men.

The post came with a warning: female readers should use red-filtered glasses. Male readers should use green-filtered ones.

The text, depending on which filter you applied, read entirely differently. Women got one message. Men got another. The punchline, buried at the bottom, was that my friend Maggie had told my wife Lola that I should get a lifetime subscription.

Nobody asked me to write it. There was no strategy behind it. No funnel. No monetization plan. No content calendar.

I just thought it was funny and I wanted to see if anyone else would too.

Four people did. One of them asked for a pair of red glasses.

That was the beginning of all of this. Read it here if you like, but I'm all out of glasses.

---

Eighteen Years of Inventory

Here is what I did not know in February 2007:

I was building inventory.

Not deliberately. Not strategically. Not with any plan beyond "I have a thought and a blog and apparently too much time."

But that's what was happening.

The humor posts became a voice. The art blog — because yes, I also started a drawing blog, because apparently one blog wasn't enough to express the full chaos of my grey matter — became a visual language. The short stories I started posting became a storytelling instinct. The characters I invented kept showing up in new stories until they had their own universe.

Eighteen years of 'I'll deal with that later' — turns out later showed up.

And all of it just... sat there.

Accumulating.

For eighteen years.

Nobody told me this was an asset class. Nobody told me that "things you've made that persist after you stop actively working on them" was a category of retirement planning. My financial advisor certainly never brought it up, though to be fair, he also never asked if I'd invented a rogue AI concierge named CAGEE.

(I had. I'll explain later. Or you can just go find him on the bookshelf.)

---

The Part Where I Have to Be Honest

I am sixty-six years old.

I work part time. I have CPP and OAS. Between those things, I'm not panicking — but I'm also not comfortable. The math that made sense at fifty-five doesn't quite make sense anymore, and the math at seventy is going to make even less sense, because inflation doesn't care about your fixed income and neither do grocery stores.

I tried the standard online income approaches. Affiliate marketing. Comparison posts. The "just follow the system" school of internet hustle.

Some of them taught me useful things. Most of them felt like wearing someone else's coat. The comparison model especially — writing posts designed to make one product look superior to another in exchange for a commission — required a tone I couldn't inhabit without feeling slightly oily afterwards.

I'm not built for that.

What I'm built for is stories.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that stories are assets.

A book, once written, doesn't expire. It doesn't require warehouse space. It doesn't need to be restocked. It can be revised, repackaged, or bundled. It can sit quietly on a virtual shelf and earn small amounts for years.

A book that sells forty copies a month at $3.99 earns roughly $104 a month.

That's one book.

Five books doing that is $520 a month.

That's not a yacht. That's insulation. Storm shutters before the economic squall rolls through.

I am in the process of building that shelf.

---

What Actually Happened Last Year

In April of last year, I brought some old blog posts to ChatGPT.

Not to have them rewritten. Not to have AI do my thinking for me. I brought them the way you'd bring a rough sketch to a collaborator — here's what I'm trying to do, what am I missing?

What happened next is the subject of an entirely separate series of posts over on Foxxfyrre Writes, but the short version is this:

I wrote more in the following twelve months than I had in the previous thirty years combined.

I finished Astral Rob, a story that had been living in my head since 1989.

I built the CAGEE Universe across a dozen interconnected stories.

I wrote The Moccasin, a horror story rooted in Fernie, BC, my father’s birthplace.

I wrote The Price House Investigation, another experiment in creative trust.

Horror. Comedy. Sci-fi. Flash fiction. Even a theological comedy about a Legion Daemon named after my daughter. 

I also wrote Writing with AI: The Messy Human's Guide — a nonfiction book about how this creative collaboration actually works, not as a prompt-engineering tutorial, but as a genuine account of what happens when a human and an AI build stories together.

That guide is on Gumroad right now.

Astral Rob is on Kindle right now.

Current total earnings: $0.08 CAD.

I'm telling you that number on purpose.

Because this blog is not about results I've already achieved. It's about results I'm building toward, in public, with real numbers, so that when they change — and they will — you can see exactly what moved the needle.

---

What This Is Really About

The eighteen years of inventory didn't become an asset the moment I started blogging.

It became an asset the moment I finished things and put them where they could be found.

That's the shift.

An unfinished idea has emotional value. A finished, published product has structural value. It can earn. It can be built upon. It can sit on a shelf and do quiet, useful work while you sleep.

This isn't only true for writers.

The grandmother with handwritten recipes passed down through generations is sitting on intellectual property.

The finishing carpenter with techniques modern contractors have forgotten holds knowledge that younger tradespeople are Googling poorly.

The nurse with thirty years in one department understands things that never made it into textbooks.

CAGEE insisted on the clipboard. I didn't argue. Foundations today

None of those people need to become influencers.

They need to become archivists of their own expertise.

Because here's the thing nobody tells you about getting older:

You are not starting over at zero.

You are starting with decades behind you.

That's not a liability.

That's inventory.

---

Where We Go From Here

This blog — Nearing Retirement and Broke, a name I chose because honesty is my whole brand — documents my attempt to turn that inventory into income.

Not dramatically. Not overnight. Not with a viral launch plan or a six-figures-in-six-months promise.

Slowly. Steadily. In public. With real numbers.

I'll show you what's working. What isn't. What earns. What costs more time than it returns. What feels sustainable and what feels like a second job in disguise.

If you're in your fifties or sixties and wondering whether it's too late to start — I'm the answer to that question.

Not because I've succeeded yet.

Because I'm in the middle of it, right now, and the middle is exactly where the useful information lives.

The inventory is real.

The shelf is being built.

And somewhere on it, there's a rogue AI concierge named CAGEE who has strong opinions about hotel maintenance protocols.

He'd want me to mention that.

TTFN

Frank

If you want to see the creative side of all this — the stories, the Writing with AI series, the CAGEE Universe — that all lives at Foxxfyrre Writes and on Foxxfyrre's Bookshelf.

If you want the practical guide to writing with AI as a creative tool — not a ghostwriter — that's Writing with AI: The Messy Human's Guide on Gumroad.

And if you just want to see where $0.08 CAD goes from here — you're already in the right place.