I have vague hopes of increasing both the quantity and the substantiveness of my writing on this blog. I have many new projects I want to launch that you have not so much as heard of. Web pages. Entire web sites. Short stories. Podcasts and other audio projects. In other words, I have ambitions.

But energy, not so much. Such is my problem.

My disease means I’m running at about 80 per cent potential, by my best guess: enough to hold down a day job, but not to do any personal projects after work. Which stymied my ambitions to write when I was working for the government: I had no energy left for writing. So I couldn’t do the usual thing of keeping the day job until the personal projects made enough money to quit, because I couldn’t get the projects started. It was only when unemployment struck that I could really begin, but at a cost of several years’ slogging before earnings approached something resembling an income. I have no complaints; I think I did all right under the circumstances.

Still, my ideas run so far ahead of my ability to enact them that there is frequently a year and a half’s delay between an idea’s genesis and its execution. And keeping up with what I’ve already started is already starting to get tricky.

One problem is that I simultaneously need to keep The Map Room going while developing other projects. The Map Room provides more than 90 per cent of my monthly income at this point, which is why I need to devote a lot of my attention to it, but on the other hand I’m nervous about having all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. So I try to diversify my portfolio — launch new projects, try new things.

The end result is that I end up being stretched pretty thin: many of my projects get short shrift. I spent today working on the design of Gartersnake.info, and that brought home the fact that I haven’t been showing that site a lot of love. Much needs updating on that site. And it’s not the only one that needs work.

I have eased up on the throttle lately. Partly it’s because I’ve geared down on FRN (I abandoned a post-every-weekday regime that recently seemed pointlessly hard on myself); partly it’s because I’ve been dealing with a brutal, phlegm-infested cold for the past week. Maybe I’m reading too much into things — boy, wouldn’t that be a switch! — but I wonder if I’m feeling burned out. On the one hand, I’m more relaxed than I ought to be if it’s burnout — I’m tired, but I’m not at all miserable. On the other, when I don’t reply to e-mails offering advertising and even work, chances are, I might be just a wee bit burned out. You think?