I’d like to start off this post with a quote from the great Mitch Hedberg:

As I’m sure you know by now, I’m writing a series of holiday stories, one for each day, with the goal of releasing 12 collections in 2024. At the time of this writing, I’m up to April 23 — only about 220 more stories to go! When I started out with the project, I was all gung-ho about it and I tore through the first month or so. But as I went further and further into the year, I began to falter. I wrote less and less. It became a chore to write more than one story per day, and as I perused my character bible and plot notes prior to each one, I found myself less and less interested in certain through-lines or characters. Which is fine; they’re my stories, after all, and I can write about who or what I want.

But I feel like I’m pancaking. I started strong, and I’m sure I’ll end strong; however, now that I’m in the middle, it’s like I’m eating a huge stack of pancakes and I’m like “ughhhhhh, I can’t finish this.” And it is a huge stack; 365 stories is a lot of words. Plus, in my case, it’s even harder to eat pancakes because I prefer the buckwheat ones and they’re usually heavier, so I get full faster. (Sorry. Lost the metaphor a bit there. If you’ve never had buckwheat pancakes, though, I highly recommend you try them.) At this point I have to force myself to write one story each day; usually, if I can write one, I can write two, and if the first two are short enough, I can write one or two more. The day before I wrote this post, I wrote two stories that totaled 3457 words. A few weeks ago, I wrote three stories that, together, totaled under 2000. Some of them are intentionally short; some of them are intentionally long. It just depends on how many pancakes I want to eat.

I’ll be eating pancakes every weekday for pretty much the rest of the year. Here’s hoping I don’t get sick of them and push the plate away, because the last thing I want to do is leave this project unfinished. That would truly be a waste of words.