I was just checking the forum before hitting the sack and saw this thread. You guys are pretty special.
I'll tell you a little story. After I posted the comment about needing the week I was on vacation to rest. I was hit by a nasty case of food poisoning. I spent about 30 hours in bed curled up in the fetal position wondering if an alien was hatching inside my stomach.
I remember waking up at one point and saying how much I wished I could be out in the shop scrolling. It's funny how a simple invisible parasite can change your perspective on things. Sunday I just wanted to lay on the couch and be lazy and yesterday I wanted to be anyplace but laying down.
I take a lot more time away from the blog than it appears. My wife and I spend more time together now that we ever have in our 32 year marriage. Believe it or not I cook all the meals and do the house work(poorly). She is retired now because of disability with her back and deserves to be taken care of for all the work she has done over the years. Before someone picks up on me cooking and the food poisoning mentioned above it was not my cooking LOL.
Burnout is not as much of a problem as disappointment. The less enthused I am about sitting down to work the worse the patterns get. It would be impossible to design a new intermediate pattern everyday so I throw in a lot of basic patterns. On those days we are only talking about 2 or 3 hours work. That's sustainable but it gets disappointing to me when I get too many of those in a row. That's what happened last week. I was putting up marginal patterns and that is just not much fun.
Here is the problem. When you write a blog and you want it to grow you have to post nearly everyday or the readers will go away. The content also has to be worth the readers attention or again they go away. There are a core group that will hang around but the blog won't support itself with just the core group. The ads you see in the email newsletter and on the blog page pay for the upkeep of the site, shop materials etc. If readers go away there is no revenue and my wife says "You want to do what with our money?". Now the blog will never be a lucrative money maker but it does have to pay the cost plus keep me happy with a new tool every now and then.
You can tell I'm feeling better because I'm rambling now. Thanks for all the support and kind words. Back to work.
