Happy to be saying "Hello Fellow Steemians!" from my perch here in Australia...
I know, that makes me sound like a budgerigar. And we'll have to live with that curious notion.
When I was a kid, I used to have budgies but that was a long time ago. Since I'm 70, it must have been a really really long time ago.
Right?
But who's looking back?
Not me.
I'm looking forward to participating in this great community. Already I've got some pals here.
Pals
I love that word "pals". It reeks of time shared together, of friendship and shared interests.
My pals that I see here already include 
I must include the gal who first mentioned Steemit to me. It was an email from 
Later, Joan put me onto an informative PDF by Helen 
Helen got me moving!
And if you haven't yet had the joy of watching 
Kindle refugee or recovering perfectionist?
As I traveled the long and winding road that led me to Steemit, I read about the benefits of becoming a published author on Amazon Kindle. Wow, a "published author". Sounded great. Better still, the royalties would accrue to my children and grandchildren.
I was hooked. I bought the course. I studied. I learned. And I wrote.
Ah, that — the writing — is the bit that took me ages because I'm a perfectionist. These days, I'm trying to be a recovering perfectionist, but the very idea of publishing anything that is not my best work just doesn't sit well.
So maybe I'm not a recovering perfectionist after all.
"We'll see," as my mother used to say. Which usually meant no.
Talking about my mother...
She was a farm girl, with two brothers. One inherited (or bought?) the farm. The other eventually bought a hardware store. Both did well financially. Both contributed significantly to my early memories. I have pleasant memories of visiting the old family farm when I was young.
It was in "the wheat belt" of WA (Western Australia). Winter mornings were crisp but we'd go out and collect mushrooms for breakfast. There, I'd forgotten that until telling you my story just now. So thanks for listening with such interest.
No wonder that my favorite TV viewing these days includes programs about rural life in Australia. Landline on the ABC is a fixture every weekend, exploring the issues that matter to farmers. And farmers are, as I hope we all know, mighty important people. They grow the food we eat. What they put on their land... and how they grow their animals affects our nutrition. For better or for worse.
We'll be talking about FOOD and NUTRITION in future posts, because as you may have noticed in my header blurb, I'm very much into NATURAL HEALTH these days. It's a passion of mine...
...which reminds me to share this link with you. http://plrgary.com/about/
That's where you'll read more about my passion for natural health.
Kindle revisited
As I was saying, I tried the Kindle thing. And to this day, I still earn from the Kindle fiction I wrote. The biggest payment last month was $2.48, if memory serves me.
"Mabel, we're rich!"
Not really.
Pat Wilpenter... who?
That, my friend, is the androgynous pseudonym I chose when I was writing my "Doctor Tess" series of Kindle stories.
It's worth visiting this page PatWilpenter.com/about just for the cute picture of my dog.
Well, not my actual dog. Just a stock photo of an adorable Golden Cocker Spaniel, which Goldie was. She was my childhood companion, along with my younger brother.
You'll also learn a bit about my Dad on that page. He was a good bloke, as we Aussies say.
En route to discovering Natural Health, I spent some time advocating green living
With a background that had injected a love of the country and farming (though I don't have a practical bone in my body and they'd never let me manage a farm), it's no surprise that I was attracted to green living.
I wrote for Going2Natural.com for a while and even though I've not contributed lately, they've kindly kept me on their team page. My brief collection of G2N contributions are listed here.
Of course, "living green" ties right in with natural health. And you'll be hearing a lot more from me about that wonderful, amazing, little-understood way of thinking. (Yep, in case it's not obvious from all those adjectives... I'm passionate!)
My freelance writing days started...
...with writing 750 words for the princely sum of $4.
That's right. As the first step on the ladder at Upwork, I accepted a writing gig that paid that giddy fee. I worked very hard on those early articles, getting a 5-star rating for every single one of them.
Bit by bit, I climbed up through the levels. "Rising star" was good. "Top rated" was even better. When I'd made it, I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about how I became top rated on Upwork.
No need to be impressed. Anybody could write as a contributor. That's what I did.
But it worked out well. When Upwork learned about the HuffPo piece, they asked me to write a version for their site, shorter than the original 2400 words. I gladly did - and it's still there.
HOWEVER... the financial rewards weren't commensurate with the amount of work I was putting in. And each client had different topics. That meant a fresh batch of research to write each topic.
Plastics manufacturing in China
Staff recruitment in the UK
Resume writing
Wordpress technical content like parallax web design
Debt collecting
Interviewing for a job
Timber flooring
You get the idea...
Each writing gig was SO DIFFERENT that it finally forced me to see the benefits of specialization. The benefits of FOCUS.
But what to focus on?
Ironically...
Years earlier, I had created NicheMarketingExplained.com to help web beginners see the benefits of going niche and helping them explore the possibilities. By the way, that domain is no longer in service, in case you were wondering.
That led me to create a course and a set of resources to help people choose a profitable niche. This became the foundational material for FindHotMarkets.com. That's another domain that I maintained for years until I finally let it go several years back.
As it turned out, I was better at dishing out that advice than following it
...which meant that I was now seriously asking myself:
Where do my interests lie?
What is my passion?
What would I enjoy researching and writing about for many years to come?
It took a while but the answer came:
NATURAL HEALTH.
And you'll be hearing more about that from me in the days, weeks and months ahead, because very little in this life that is more important than our health.
Your health.
My health.
The health of the nation.
So... THANK YOU FOR THE TIME YOU SPENT HERE WITH ME TODAY. AND I LOOK FORWARD TO CHATTING WITH YOU AGAIN.
Verification notes: For those who're interested, you'll find my name and picture on several sites I own and manage...
And also on several social media sites, though I confess to being highly inactive with these... which is all the more reason to love Steemit because it's so different: