Are holidays for rest or productivity?

I’ve spent the last few days on holiday planning. I’m an academic, and my university shuts down from just before Christmas till just after New Years, giving me ~10 days off during which I don’t have to monitor email or think about work in any way. I don’t have much family, so I don’t have holiday houseguests, and I’m not expected to travel anywhere.

Yet I manage to stress about Winter Break every year.

Why? Because overthinking is one of my superpowers (the others are being so lazy my FitBit thinks I’m dead and eating my body weight in Extra Toasty Cheez-Its).

Before we get to my overthinking of Winter Break: This post is part of the IWSG (Insecure Writers Support Group) blog hop. On the first Wednesday of each month, we insecure writers get together virtually to show off our insecurities support each other. Our awesome December co-hosts are Joylene Nowell Butler, Chemist Ken, Natalie Aguirre, Nancy Gideon, and Cathrina Constantine. Stop by and leave them some comment love.

Each month our fearless leaders provide an optional question we can answer in our posts. This month’s question is: It’s holiday time! Are the holidays a time to catch up or fall behind on writer goals?

Which brings us back to my overthinking. How should I spend the precious unstructured, demand-free time I get only once a year? Should I write for hours and finally make progress on the Novel Revision from Hell? Should I revamp my author website, a project I started and flailed with for several days of last Winter Break? Do all the garden chores I’ve been putting off since last March? Finish organizing 20 years of photos in my Dropbox? Take a road trip with Long-Suffering Husband to somewhere interesting? Visit friends in California I haven’t seen in years? Or should I use this time to lounge around in sweatpants, convince my FitBit I’m dead, and eat my body weight in Extra Toasty Cheez-Its decompress?

I want to do all of the above. And because I only get this kind of unstructured, demand-free time once a year, I put all kinds of pressure on myself to Use It Well. In other words, I try to give it structure and make demands of myself.

Why yes, I am ridiculous. Thanks for noticing.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last several weeks trying to figure out how I was going to fit in all the fun stuff listed above–writing, travel, and Extra Toasty Cheez-Its–and concluded I need a time-turner. Whew, there’s that problem solved.

Wait, Harry Potter isn’t real?

Damn it. Another dream crushed by this cold, cruel world.

But over the weekend another magical solution came to me. What if I… took another week off?

So, dear reader, I did. And now I’m going to have time to take a road trip, fly to California, write, and revamp my website. Well, the first 2 things will happen. The others may become casualties of a Cheez-It-induced food coma.

What’s the point of all this rambling? Just this: There’s never enough time–to write, work, see family, travel, and relax. I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to take off a block of time during the holidays, but so many people aren’t (and some years I can’t). We have to prioritize, and sometimes that means we need to prioritize ourselves. If the holidays give you time to catch up on writing–great! I hope your words come easy and you can spend January basking in the warm glow of accomplishment. But if your holidays are a frantic blur of kids and shopping and cooking and cleaning and traveling to see family you don’t even like–that’s OK too. Your story will still be there when the decorations are packed away, the annoying relatives are back to being only traumatic memories, and your house is back to looking like a tornado hit a meth lab.

And if you can take some extra time off just for yourself, do it. And don’t overthink it like I do. Enjoy it. Because there’s more to life than productivity.

Writing News

I avoided the Novel Revision from Hell this year by writing a few short stories and submitting them for various anthologies and contests. In the last few weeks, I’ve learned that:

• My Christmas horror story, “The Fine Print,” will be published in the 2022 Deathlehem anthology (more on that here)
• My thriller short story, “Adam Carmona and the Saguaro Ripper,” will be published in another anthology. I can’t announce details yet because the ink is literally barely dry on the contract (I signed it right before I started this post) but I’ll be squeeing about it soon.
• My suspense short story, “Walk Me Home,” won first place in a contest. I can’t share details about that yet either, because winners won’t be announced till this Saturday, after which I’ll be squeeing about it.

So while 2022 has been a struggle for me as a writer, I do have a few accomplishments to be proud of.

Writing Memes

Time to laugh at our insecurities!

Nooooooooo………………

Also anyone except my co-workers and most of my friends. Like, they know I’m weird, but not THAT weird. And what if… they don’t like my story? *whimper*

In other words:

Here’s another one from the hilarious Alexander Pennington. Seriously, you should follow him and Tara Wine-Queen. They have the best writer memes.

All. The. Time.

Also All. The. Time.

And speaking of things I do, here’s how I won NaNo a few years ago:

Which leads to this:

This, friends, is how you get the Revision from Hell.

And finally:

On that note, I’m outta here.

How do you plan to balance writing with holiday insanity this year?