Those who know me appreciate how much I like a challenge.  I decided to double-major at university because giving myself a bit of flexibility and breathing room throughout my degree felt too slack.  It's why as soon as I graduated, I applied for full-time work in an industry in which I had no experience, and began at the office within a few days of being offered the job.  But this persistence to get my responsibilities out of the way before allowing myself any fun often means that once my duties are done, I'm grouchy from the knowledge that I have been working too hard, whilst simultaneously hankering for some new way to burn through my days because I'm bored.

Naturally, the challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in November through National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) seemed a perfectly sane idea for me to do within the same four weeks that I was already slated to both move house, and jet interstate for five days.  I approached the challenge with military precision, dutifully packing up my laptop to tap away on the train to work each day, befriending the perky English girl that worked at the cafe near my offices so I could have a chai and a type in peace (although, miser that I am, I never returned after she overcharged me that one time), and ensuring that I was awake an hour earlier than I needed to be every single day so that I could hit the word count before 8.30am... and if I decided to write on the train home as well, so much the better.

To clarify: normal people do not do NaNoWriMo.  Every person I met at the first social event of the season was lovely, switched on, and desperate to get started.  That night, I stared at a sea of people in bunny ears, oversized band t-shirts and overalls, and saw, vainglorious creature that I am, my own emo-loving, pubescent awkwardness reflected back at me, ad infinitum.  But the people I met that night didn't need to be normal.  No good writer is.  After an hour of chatting about our stories, and becoming increasingly excited by the diversity of minds around us, my friend and I departed from the meeting feeling genuinely bolstered for the month ahead.  The countdown from then to November 1 was an arduous one.  I couldn't wait to begin.

I didn't stay up to partake the midnight write-in.  Heck, I didn't make it to another NaNoWriMo event, social or work-related, for the entire month.  But the invaluable company of my fellow writers for one evening motivated me to push on when I felt my feet dragging in the dirt for every one of those thirty days.

My commitment to NaNoWriMo did not cease for anything short of calamity.  I allowed myself one day off, and that was to move house.  By the next day, I was writing furiously from the early hours of the morning with atonement on my mind, spurring myself as if I had something to prove for the absence.  I wrote on the plane interstate, and tapped away furiously on my creaky hostel bed at 10pm on a Saturday night when seemingly everyone else in Sydney was partying at the nightclub just downstairs, making out with adorably-accented foreigners.  But I had taken this trip with a very particular agenda, and I wanted my weekend's quota out of the way before the main event on the Monday evening.

I had gone to see the King of Fiction, himself, speak.  He answered questions from the audience about the religions and minutiae of his world, and bantered merrily with the actresses from the television adaption about whether winter was truly coming.  He held the entire Opera House in the palm of his hand, and we barely dared breathe, so desperate were we to catch his every word.

After the panel discussion, those who had paid six hundred dollars for the privilege of receiving autographs, having a chat, and being photographed with he and the actresses were instructed to line up on one side of the building.  The cheaper-ticket holders were told that they could line up along the other side of the great Opera House for an autograph... if they wished to try their luck, and if the man himself felt so inclined as to hang around.  It was evident that any autograph-dispersing on his behalf was utterly subject to whim, and not to duty.  I contemplated not lining up for all of thirty seconds.  Only when I recalled that I had nowhere better to be did I search for, and find, my friend in the line.  By the time I reached the tail, it was already over a hundred people deep.

The people in the queue churned ahead of me silently, silent with a deferential awe as they approached the little table of the most renowned living fantasy writer on the planet.  He signed each book placed before him with frenetic energy and within moments, the expectant fan would make for the front door, clutching their oh-so-cherished, autographed merchandise in shaking hands.  As my book was handed over by an Opera House employee, I instinctively thanked the man himself for his time.  He actually raised his gaze to look at me and my brain went crazy, urging me to be cool.  I was so excited that I almost missed our entire conversation.  He asked me if I had had a nice night, to which I replied: "Absolutely, it was amazing.  I'm an aspiring author, and hearing you speak has made me want to go home and write like mad."

And George R.R. Martin said to me, "Then write! Never stop writing.  Persevere, persevere!"

From then on, the challenge was not to simply "win" NaNoWriMo, but to write as much as I could and with as much energy as I could possibly muster.  After all, George R.R. Martin himself had charged me with the duty.

The bare bones for my second novel, Love, Inc., was finished within a week of that moment.  Though I harbour a subconscious terror that I am encountering a sophomore slump, I granted myself the permission to edit at a reasonable pace, one conducive to my time-poor lifestyle.  I am no longer in a desperate hurry to prove that I can "finish", though by no means is that something to turn one's nose up at.  Because the few throwaway words of advice from my favourite author reflect the equal blessing and curse of the writer: there is no finish line, no point whereupon we really feel that we have said enough.  We write because the story is clawing at our insides, desperate to spring from the confines of our mind onto paper.  And we want to be rid of it as if it were a parasite sucking us dry, because to hold onto it too long evokes the same dread as if we were squeezing an infant too tight.  We love the story desperately, but until it is rendered in ink, it is not permanent, or fixed, or safe.  To simply hope that we will remember its nuances is to guarantee forgotten details, or lost insight into the characters.  When we are so cripplingly scared of putting our baby into words and rendering it vulnerable to criticism, we have already failed.  The alternative is agony but it's the sweetest struggle there is.

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, I'm exhausted.  Looking at my manuscript, which required an additional 7,000 words to pass my benchmark, I felt no desperation to churn the final, filler pages out. It is not the satisfaction of completion that motivates me, though it is an amazing sensation to see page upon page materialise by your hand.  The process itself is magic.  There is no feeling in the entire world quite like when the right words appear onscreen unconsciously, as if your fingers have been hijacked by a third party, and your characters are reacting to the world around them in ways that surprise even you.  It's the writing that I hunger for, not the completed project.  No matter how many books I write, there will only ever be one story: the one I am writing now.

So yeah, I guess I did conquer NaNoWriMo... but in many ways, NaNoWriMo conquered me, too.  Because it slaughtered the pedant inside of me, allowing me to disregard deadlines or expectations of myself, and simply write.  And given that the first tome of A Song of Ice and Fire was released the year that I was born, and the series shows no sign of being completed soon, I think my hero would approve.

You know when you're knee-deep in work, and you feel like despite ratcheting up the "crazy scale"* more and more everyday, you're just failing all over the place at being a normal human being? I'm talking about that feeling that the minute you achieve something small, you realise your achievement was a globule of spit in the great roaring bushfire of your workload.

In my world, it goes: you get your readings for classes under control (whoops, speaking of which...), you have to rush off to one of your two paid jobs; or pop into a Google Hangout/meeting for one of your two volunteer jobs; or your father accurately describes your bedroom as a "brothel", (which, fun fact, is a legitimate synonym for "messy"); you have a class presentation to make in the same week as three lengthy essays are due; your gym membership is going to waste because you went and fell down the stairs and messed up your foot so you limp like a cross between a bad pirate impersonator and Bigfoot stuck in a bear trap; and you haven't washed your clothes (or yourself) for a suspiciously long time... and, most unforgivable of all, it's taken you five days to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones.

Well, that's the level of pandemoniac I rock on a regular basis.  I know it all may be manageable if I were to drop maybe one or two of my four external time commitments that fall loosely beneath the category of "paid/unpaid work", but in truth, I am in my element.  It probably has something to do with the adrenaline rush that comes with teetering on the precipice of madness.  I enjoy knowing that I've got more commitments than I should be able to handle, but the wheels are refusing to fall off.  I'm the little engine that could, motherfucker.  Toot toot.

Many of you probably know the amazing pop anthem of energetic apathy, "I Love It." You know, the one about driving bridges into cars or some such business.  It is the victory song that I wish I could have written myself, if I'd had more than three years of recorder lessons... and before you get into it: yes, I am aware that the minimum primary school requirement for recorder lessons was one year.  For some misguided reason I thought that I had picked the one musical instrument would never fade into obscurity.

The thing that I love so much about this song is that it has maybe all of six different lines, which I simply can't seem to recall when I'm enthusiastically rocking out.  I riff the lyrics without a self-consciousness or capability, and ten out of ten times, the words mangle badly.  But I don't let that stop me, because I'm stubborn as a mule, and "I Love It" is my victory song!

And sing it I did upon the moment wherein I tapped the final sentence of my novel, and pressed the image of the floppy disk that signifies a bygone era.

Yes, dear friends, readers, acquaintances, stalkers, and that one random family member who might accidentally stumble across this post whilst practice-Googling my name to make sure that my cyber-footprint is concealed to protect me from baddies:

I have finished "Softly Screamed the Devil".

Upon raw completion, it clocked in at a solid 345 pages in length, but its girth has shifted frequently with each of its, thus far, six full edits.  Writing a book is hard, no doubt about it, but editing is work.  The time-vacuum kind.  The "can't multitask doing this" kind.  Therefore, I'm all about it.

Despite my life being fifty shades of cray on the time-management front, I'm loving nigh on everything.  Admittedly, I'm not shameless in the way an author should be when it comes to pitching my own work, so the next insurmountable obstacle will be to let people who aren't my Nonno or my agent actually read it.  But that can be "tomorrow Scarlett"'s job.  Today Scarlett is busy.

*Not crazy-hot, just crazy.  Because if you saw the split-ended, curtains-wide-open fringed, pimply yet dry-skinned mess I have become, your first thought would be "Damn, girl", but for all the wrong reasons.