They say the backbone of a good newsletter is consistency, and I haven’t been able to deliver that recently. Little workaday setbacks have been throwing me off more seriously than they normally would. Am I burned out? Maybe. But I think what’s happening is slightly different and a little more insidious.

I’m a little overwhelmed, true, but I’m not under undue work-related or personal stress at the moment. I’m experiencing a period of lower-than-normal energy, but my energy constantly ebbs and flows, and I’m already doing my low-energy protocol for regular day-to-day stuff. It mostly feels like I’m costantly pushing too hard against my limits and that I have less margin than I normally do.

While I can hope that this new limitation is temporary — and it probably is — this means that I need to put some activities on hold and scale back on others. Since my paid work has to take precedence (thanks a lot, capitalism), personal projects bear the brunt of this assessment.

My novel revision is my creative priority, so I’ve chosen to put my YouTube project on indefinite hold. That’s the secret project I’ve been hinting about for a long time, and I’m super bummed about it. Realistically, I also need to scale back the newsletter schedule.

The truth is that I hate to flake. I hate it. I truly can’t stand when I say I’ll do something but don’t follow through. So often the standards I fail to live up to are my own, but when I fail to deliver something I’ve promised others, I feel gross and useless.

With all of that in mind, it’s time to lower everybody’s expectations (including my own), and give this newsletter a new schedule. I plan to post every other Friday from now until the end of June, then I’m (probably) going to take off July and August. (That summer break was exactly what I needed last year!) I intend to come back in September, then do something wild in October again. (But not quite as wild as last year, because I learned that 13 posts is, in fact, Too Many Posts.)

And if I can’t make that work, damn it, I’ll figure out something else. Iterate and pivot, baby! That’s all we do on the internet in the 21st century, after all. Anyway, apologies for the unplanned absence and I’ll return with my regular BS on Friday.