It’s Friday, dear reader. Last night, in those weird hours between 2-4 am, I decided I’d Had Enough and declared war on my own goddamn book.  Your favorite bourbon-soaked, deadline-dodging wordsmith has officially reached The Breaking Point – that sublime moment where the accumulated weight of procrastination, self-doubt, and the relentless ticking of the cosmic clock converges into a singularity of pure, unadulterated Fuck This Noise.  This book – this magnificent bastard of a manuscript that has been haunting the Dissolute Desk  like some literary poltergeist, it’s incomplete chapters mocking me with their half-formed sentences and their orphaned paragraphs that read like the fevered ramblings of a concussed psychology major who’s been drinking nothing but expresso and existential dread for six months straight.  And I’ve been dancing around it, tiptoeing through the metaphorical minefield of my own making, treating this project like it’s some precious, fragile butterfly that might disintegrate if I breathe on it too heard, when in reality what I’ve got here is more like a literary Frankenstein’s monster that needs a goddamn lightning bolt to bring it to life.  Damn right!

But here’s where things get interesting, dear reader – and by interesting, I mean the kind of desperate, last-stand-at-the-Alamo interesting that makes your pulse quicken and your liver quiver in anticipation – because I’ve officially declared war on this motherfucking manuscript.

September 8th.

Circle that date on your calendars with whatever writing implement causes you the most existential anxiety, because that’s when this whole circus of literary self-flagellation comes to an end.  That’s my drop-dead, no-bullshit, put-up-or-shut-up deadline to transform this sprawling, incoherent mess of caffeine-fueled stream-of-consciousness nonsense into something that resembles an actual book – coherent, cohesive, and presentable enough that I won’t want to set myself on fire every time someone asks me what I’m working on.

The other projects?  Those sweet little side hustles and creative dalliances that I’ve been juggling like some demented circus performer?  They’re gone.  Banished.  Exiled to the outer darkness of my “maybe later” folder, which, let’s be honest, is basically the creative equivalent of a mass grave.  The calendar has been cleared with the ruthless efficiency of a mob accountant, leaving nothing but blank space and the terrifying possibility of actually finishing something for once in this decade.

Is this madness?  Probably.  Is it the kind of beautiful, self-destructive madness that makes for great stories at dinner parties with rich people five years from now?  Oh God yes.  Because there’s something intoxicating about backing yourself into a corner so tight that the only way out is through – through all the bullshit.

But here’s the thing about corners: they clarify priorities with the brutal efficiency of a midnight deadline or an empty whiskey bottle.  When you’ve got nowhere left to run, nowhere left to hide behind your clever excuses and your perfectly reasonable rationalizations for why the work isn’t getting done, something primal kicks in – that same animal instinct that once helped our ancestors outrun saber-toothed tigers now gets channeled into the slightly less life-threatening task of stringing together coherent sentences.

So consider this your official notification, universe: the gloves are off, the safety net has been torched, and I’m going full kamikaze on this rotten project that has been torturing me for far too long.  September 8th or bust, motherfuckers.

And if I fail?  That’s not going to happen.  Because there’s nothing quite like the terror of a public declaration to turn a procrastinating writer into a deadline-slaying beast.

Watch this space, dear reader.  Things are about to get very interesting indeed.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish and some serious literary violence to commit.

N.P.: “Why?” – Jestofunk, CeCe Rogers