Why I Retired Early

Questions came from friends and family. How can you afford to retire at such a young age? What do you plan to do in retirement?

I can thank my financial advisor for making retirement possible. My wife introduced me to her in my 30s, and we spent hours figuring out how to fund my retirement.

Thanks to her, I receive a monthly check from my self-funded pension. I think of it as a pension because I will receive the checks monthly until the end of my life. Additionally, we moved all of my 401(K) money to an IRA. My financial advisor sets up automatic monthly payments from that. The combination of the two enabled me to retire.

What I do in retirement is more interesting. During COVID, I wrote my first fiction novel, Growing Future Operators (GFO). That novel had me working every weekend from January 2020 until its publication in 2023. Through that novel, I found a creative spirit that brings me peace. My stress dropped like crazy from Friday night through Sunday, and I repeated that for more than three years on weekends.

Besides the stress drop. I also found that I loved to write. In the past, managers told me to write shorter emails. Back then, I wrote many blog posts for companies and my website. Would I write 75,000 to 80,000 words? My initial version of the manuscript was closer to 90,000. 

Would I enjoy the editing process? Yes, I enjoyed it, too, and performed many self-edits before sending the manuscript to a professional editing company. The rounds included a complete rewrite from one point of view (POV) to three POVs. That edit increased the tension in the novel by a lot, too. After my edits, I turned it over to the FirstEditing company for two more rounds of editing. BookBaby became my choice for publishing the book.

BookBaby created the cover for GFO, and I loved it. I consider GFO as the DevOps book. Using editing and publishing companies meant my book would appear professional, even though it was self-published.

Once I discovered I enjoyed the whole publishing process, I found what I wanted to do in retirement. The only thing left to figure out was what genre I would work in. That was easy for me, as I love crime stories, thrillers, and horror stories.

I thought about doing a crime procedural, but I don't know any police officers who would help me with the procedural information needed to pass readers' inspection. I understand why Michael Connelly's novels are based on the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). A weekend of research showed me that procedures vary a lot between different departments. 

I also considered cozy mysteries, but I have never read them. Writing based on a genre you don't read would be hard.

My next choice is to write a crime thriller. Any kind of thriller requires me to figure out red herrings and twists and turns. That lets me work with crime without needing to do a year of research to determine procedural requirements.

I wrote my first manuscript for GFO without any planning whatsoever. For the next one, I will follow the structure from AutoCrit and use their scene beats. I plan to start on January 2, 2024, by building a list of scenes, scene descriptions, setting or place, and the breakdown of a scene into its components. I hope to finish that in January, develop my characters in February, and start writing the first manuscript in March.

When I tell people I am a full-time novelist, I mean I spend about 25 hours per week on it. I do the bulk of my writing Monday through Thursday. I perform tangential tasks for the book on Friday and take the weekends off. The rest of my time is spent reading, going to movies, cooking, baking, photography, and traveling.