Oh lordy, it’s all too horribly predictable, isn’t it? Ah. Wait a minute. I realise that answering that question would be a tad tricky without knowing to what the ‘it’ actually refers. Ahem. As you were… The ‘it’ is the fact that I find, despite loud, repetitive and heartfelt pleas of near-insanity issued during my time as a doctoral candidate, that I sort of miss doing something academicky.

See? That’s where the horribly predictable bit comes in. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that having succeeded yet again in pulling the wool over their eyes and fooling them into thinking that I was actually a deserving doctoral candidate, that I would still be in that just-finished, ha-fooled-them-again!-type bliss, and that anything remotely intellectual would be the last thing on my mind. And in many ways it is. I still can’t quite believe that I haven’t got to come home, resist the urge to vegetate on the sofa while reading something deeply unlikely (this week: Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris, vies with Ghostwalk, by Rebecca Stott, who, coincidentally, I had known previously only as an academic author whose research area was pleasantly close to my own, but not so close as to make reading her writing feel like work), and pick up some hideous section of my own prose which needs pruning to within an inch of whatever life it may have managed to sustain throughout five previous prunes, before returning it to a nearly-always-absent supervisor for the heaping-on of further criticisms, said heaping-on to take just long enough to guarantee that I will have forgotten a) what I wrote, b) what I may have meant, and c) why I ever began this tortuous task.

But while I’m delighted to have finished (and indeed just writing that paragraph reminded me of all the nastiness associated with the project), I still (and I cannot believe I am thinking this, never mind writing it – Quercus will probably begin plotting my immediate and violent demise at this point) find I’m interested in the subject. And in the offshoots that I came across during my research, several of which made it to proto-chapters before being culled in one of those pruning sessions mentioned heretofore (‘heretofore’ – isn’t that a fantastic word?). For example, when I was a small, I loved John Masefield’s books for children; imagine, then, my delight when I realised that much of his portrayals of two leading characters therein clearly derived from his friendship with someone associated with the world of magic and witchcraft. (That bit stayed in, in footnote form, though I wish I’d had a spare chapter.) And now, I’m contemplating writing a paper about it. I’m also contemplating revisiting a full chapter which I ended up cutting fairly late in the process because, horror of horrors, the word-limit of 80 – 100,000 words was a mere memory, and I found I had to shed at least twenty thousand words to ensure that my thesis wasn’t published in triple-decker format… That chapter wasn’t bad, though I say it as shouldn’t, and it had had a couple of trips to conferences by the time I bumped it off. I suppose I feel I have unfinished business with it, not least because, of the three authors I explored in my research, its focus, Arthur Conan Doyle, was by far my favourite, both as a writer and, to judge from the biographies and his own autobiography, as a person. And then I’ve just submitted an abstract for a six-thousand-word article based on one of the other chapters, one which did make the final cut; if it’s accepted, it would be a – much shortened! – chapter in a forthcoming critical re-evaluation of its subject, H. Rider Haggard.

I wonder if this is all just because I don’t have to. Having spent so long resenting my thesis and feeling completely inadequate about the whole bloody thing, it’s very strange to find oneself actively seeking out more of the same. Particularly as my prime excuse for not having had a bash at writing a novel or something was always that I hadn’t got time because of my research commitment. Here I am, then – no research commitment, bags of ideas for academic writing and, equally, for fiction, yet it’s the academic that calls to me. I wonder if it’s a question of familiarity? I mean, I know it breeds contempt, but it also breeds a degree of comfort, I suppose; I have been in higher education since 1998, after all, and during that time, the biggest events of my life have taken place – an accident which nearly killed my father, meeting Quercus, the death of my mother, Quercus and I getting our own house(s), getting married, having the tiny daughter… A lot of change, but with one stable thing – the constant, gloaming presence of academic guilt.

Quercus thinks I should press on with something fictional, and I have got a loose outline for a story (though not yet an ending in mind, despite having clear pictures of place, time and character), and 20,000 words of another one (written while I was basically skiving my PhD, and not really revisited since I finished). Trouble is, that sort of thing just keeps getting shunted further down the list, behind what feels like money for old academic rope (i.e. publications out of work already written, albeit in need of substantial revision for word-count restrictions etc.), potentially. So when does one say enough is enough, and start priorities afresh? Am I just holding on to a vestigial sense of comfort, derived, bizarrely, from an atmosphere which, when it was my full-time home, did a fair job of really pissing me off in equal measures with pushing me intellectually, boosting my for-some-reason reasonably fragile sense of self-esteem and thus making me even more prone to these moments of self-indulgent navel-gazing?

And will I ever stop asking open-ended questions?

Who knows?

Answers on a postcard, thanks.