I crashed my bridge into the milky way.

Pictured: the copy of Softly Screamed the Devil I dutifully red-penned to hell.

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.

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