‘Tis the season when I envy binge writers. You know the type that I mean. They take a few hours and produce half a story or a whole chapter of a novel. I’m much more of the plodding sort, steadily amassing a modest word count each day while I quietly fantasize about what it would be like to produce those high-figure word counts that several of my friends report. So when the holiday season seems to turn all too many of us from “human beings” into “human doings,” I sense that things must be better for my binge-writing buddies for a couple of reasons. They must be putting to good use those few hours here or there when they can get their writing done. If not, their post-holiday binge writing will more than make up for it, bringing their works in progress to completion relatively soon. Meanwhile, all these days and weeks with decorating, shopping, wrapping, sending out cards and packages, etc., piled on top of the regular routine really mess with the daily and weekly writing progress I had hoped to achieve. Simply making up for it by writing more words next month doesn’t seem feasible.
Here’s what I do to console myself while sipping eggnog: I tell myself this is simply an instance of thinking the grass is always greener in someone else’s yard. In ways I don’t suspect, it may well be that the holiday season isn’t any easier for binge writers than for us plodders. It’s just that I don’t know, first hand, how the holidays mess with my binge wring friends. Might some of them actually wish, from time to time, that they could write at a constant rate each day or week?