A few weeks ago, I changed my thyroid medication, or rather, went back to my old medication. I’d been having what I call exhaustion colds, and also feeling as if I just didn’t have the energy I once did. I felt old, like my internal battery was wearing out.

The good news is that the change in thyroid medication seems to have really done the trick. I have much better overall energy levels. While I may have needed the couple of weeks at coffee shops in order to regain focus, I’m now wondering if that trick wouldn’t have been as effective without the change in meds.

I wrote 18K last week. I wrote close to that the week before – 17.8K. My feeling as of today, Monday, is that I’ll manage that easily this week. I’m back on track, back to writing, and that is a sign that my energy levels have returned.

In addition, this last week, while I was mowing, I came up with ideas for two different short stories. It wasn’t until I was thinking about it later that I realized that I hadn’t been doing that at all.

The joke Blaze and I share is this: a new writer asks, “Where do you get your ideas?” A more experienced writer asks, “How do you make them stop?”

I used to be like that. I used to have so many ideas, all the time. I didn’t realize that I was generating fewer ideas, that the flow had slowed to a trickle. Now that I’m thinking about it, I realize that I was also having difficulty generating ideas when it came to the novels as well, couldn’t just leap into the next scene. Had to sit and think.

But now, writing the novel is easy again. The ideas are back. Plus, I have ideas for short stories that I get to write at some point.

There is still a part of me that’s mortally offended that I don’t have the energy levels I did when I was twenty. I still push and try to do more than I should. At the same time, I’m so grateful that I do have more energy again, probably more now than I had at the start of the year.

I’m writing this blog post in the morning, before I do the fiction writing, as we’re camping and have no internet. I’ll post later this afternoon. So I won’t get back to people or comments or email or anything for the rest of this week. (There’s no cell phone signal at our campsite.)

I’m still going to ask a question, though I won’t be able to read your responses for a while: how do you keep track of your energy levels? What are you doing, or planning on doing, in order to maintain them as you age? I’m sure that my diet is part of the reason why my malfunctioning thyroid didn’t knock me on my ass right away. What else can I do to be a really spry 90 year old?