As a freelance writer, you should be writing off everything. Anything that is spent on a potential story is fair game. When you wrote that you had been hanging out at that hippy co-worker commune I was worried, but when you said you thought twice and figured out a way to get NPR to pay you for it, my Capitalist heart swelled three sizes larger.

If you can figure out how to get paid for things that you want to do, then you are already ahead of the game. With those benefits comes great risk and it’s important to make sure that Uncle Sam gives you the discounts that are typically only reserved for our fine upstanding corporate citizens.