Earlier this week, 6 weeks of vacation per year and not on weekends Andrew Sullivan confided to a certain case of blog fatigue:

It can become grueling. I just checked how many words I have written for the blog this year and it’s already approaching 200,000 words. If I wrote four books in five months, I’d rightly give myself a vacation. And I’d be rolling in it.

We should leave aside, for the purposes of efficiency, the notion that if Andrew wrote books he would earn a lot of money in the process — something that, last we checked, does not necessarily happen to an author (even a good one.)

200,000 words. (Well, “approaching” anyway.) That sure does sound like a lot. Except that given the way Andrew “writes,” one’s oeuvre tends to accumulate quickly. Indeed, we were reminded of our little December surveys when we’d provided a quick estimate of the Daily Dish corpus, divided between quotes and things Andrew actually wrote himself. Our consolidated results (data here and there): 2,298 words of quotes/awards/etc, and 1,352 (37% of the total) words he can rightfully claim to have written. On Thursday and Friday, the DD featured 2,372 words. 1,093 (46%) of those were written by Mr. Sullivan, the rest are copy and paste jobs. (And we did give him credit for writing “here’s a link to x, y and z.”) That ratio of CTRL-V is, to put it kindly, pretty high for a guy who chooses to whine about all the hard work he puts in.

Should you decide to factor in Andrew’s European-length vacations, his reader-driven salary, his ability to resell some of his blogging work to The Washington Times, The New Republic and The Sunday Times, well, let’s just say we’d consider ourselves pretty lucky to have a gig like that.