Don’t worry, that wasn’t the sound of me biting off more than I can chew! That was me swallowing the last unpalatable bite of university for the year! FOREVER! Sort of. Unpalatable is the wrong word really. The assignments tasted like recycled cardboard and the university’s attitude towards certain things tasted like all the bitterness a cup of bitter pills and burned coffee could produce but the placements are certainly edible. I really took the wrong analogy for that one. You wouldn’t want to put the majority of things I see anywhere near your mouth unless you chased it with some fire eating.

Therefore, I have been extraordinarily busy – to the point where I even ended up in hospital myself! It’s a different kind of suck being a patient in an ED after you’ve worked in one. They couldn’t work out what was wrong with me, but I strongly suspect it was an exacerbation of asthma coupled with my lingering chest infection that had been plaguing me for months. Possibly with a side of anxiety over a certain person I’d like to enact certain parts of Grand Theft Auto V on, particularly the kind where you run them over repeatedly.

I’ve been playing an awful lot of Grand Theft Auto V. It’s quite therapeutic really. I was feeling very sad about not being offered a graduate position in Victoria so I ran over some people, gunned down some others and stole an absolute shitload of cars and sold them for money and started winning races against other players online. This is a big thing for me! I don’t play Xbox Live often, mostly because I’m unashamedly crap at first person shooters so it holds no interest for me, but also because I stupidly made an identifiably feminine gamer tag a hundred years ago that I refuse to pay $10 to change (up yours Microsoft!) which sometimes makes me a target for bored misogynists. Amazingly, I’ve had no problems with this in GTA V which is only fuelling my current obsession for the game.

I have been hard at work honing my short story skills. They’re getting there. I don’t think I’m really much for short stories to be honest. Some short stories are OK (which reminds me I saw this the other day and I must go and buy it) but the majority of those I’ve been reading as part of my degree seem to be trying too hard. Maybe that’s just me. I don’t like literature that is overly fond of obfuscation to pass itself off as intelligent (much like I am doing by using the word obfuscation!). I’m a reader for pleasure. Sure, I like clever things here and there (i.e. Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair) but I can only take so much ambiguity and allegory before I start to get pissed off.

I have adapted my paranormal story (I’ve talked about that here) to make it suitable for a young adult audience. This was a pretty big gamble for me since I’ve had very limited exposure to the YA genre, with the exception of those that rise up and infest every nook and cranny of popular society (I’m looking you, Hunger Games. You and your the mopey muppet counterpart Twilight). It seemed to pay off however. The language I naturally write in doesn’t appear to have graduated from high school, that or I’m still mentally a teenager. Some days I wake up to a toddler peeing in my bed and think I’m having a bad dream and I’m late for school, so I guess I just haven’t grown up yet.

What else? Oh I’m an auntie again. My sister, as she so eloquently put it in her text message at the very lovely hour of 1am yesterday, “pooped out another baby”. I’ve now got another niece to add to my growing collection of children that I can borrow so I don’t have to have any more. She named it Zelda Lily. I approve of the Lily part, but not so much the Zelda. Aside from being a useless Nintendo princess, this is Zelda:

A teenaged me with Zelda, my sister’s cat.

My sister pooped out a little HUMAN and named it after the cat she had for 12 years. I think there’s an Indiana Jones joke to be made here but I’m a little too horrified at the moment. Actually Lily is the name of one of our mutual friend’s dog. So the poor kid better grow up with a sense of humour and a desire to be a vet because otherwise she’s doomed.