Finishing up my thesis

After 2 years of part time study there are just over 2 weeks to go until T Day: Thesis Day.

It does not seem that long ago that I decided to drag myself back on campus to get excited by writing again, and now 2 years on, and with the end so close, I feel both joy and sadness that it will soon all be over again.

By October 30th I will expunged responsibility for a 4,500 word exegesis and a 11,000 word creative piece, answering the question on every digital marketer’s lips:

How do naturalist narrative strategies facilitate the representation of trauma in post apocalyptic texts?

Doing a thesis on a subject so ridiculously unrelated to my full time work has been an interesting experience. I come home each night from icons and HTML and welcome the end of the world. As much as I have tried to justifiably link the two, tourism and the end of the world don’t mix, and it has often been a challenge balancing the simultaneous demands of the two.

I have re-discovered the yearn to push my writing forward once again and challenge my existing perceptions of what kind of writer I am, and what I can and can’t produce. I haven’t always been successful in this regard, and the creative part of my thesis will I’m sure leave my hands with a sense of lost opportunity: a feeling most writers will probably relate to at the end of a long fiction project.

But as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the flux between origin and destination is the stuff that defines you. I came into the the honours grind without the confidence to finish a single creative line. Now I have 801 to be exact, and more than 30,000 words in my Mac recycle bin.

So it has been a great experience and one that I would encourage any fearless writer to embark upon. Once I’ve used up the next two week’s rifling through my dog-eared thesaurus, I will post both pieces up here for everyone to digest.

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