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Hey Gemma, I've noticed that you've been pretty quiet on your blog of late.

Yes, I haven't even looked at it for about a month. I've been very stressed writing the introductory chapter for my thesis, and so I cut out all potential distractions.

Surely a few minutes on a blog wouldn't make much difference?

You'd be surprised. I still like reading other people's blogs, and so when I've had a spare moment that's what I've done. But I'm a slow writer and I often like writing longer posts, so I just decided not to. I think I made the right decision - I have a lot more free time again now.

How do you feel about your chapter, now that you're working on the next one?

Well, Chapter One is finished for now, but I know that I'll probably need to rewrite it at the end of the PhD - after all, it is the introductory section. I might end up entirely removing the section on film-induced tourism as postmodern practice, but at the moment I just need to bury it for a few months. I'm so happy to be working on a new chapter now... yes, so happy!

Can you briefly tell me about this chapter?

Hmmm. Well I am historicising film-induced tourism in this chapter, focussing on the post World War Two era and the birth of the leisure industry. The Mike Todd film Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) is a useful text here for the chapter's organisation, mainly because it allows me to make productive connections between modernity (the birth of tourism and cinematic technologies) and postmodernity, through its dialogue with the Jules Verne novel that was serialised in the 1870s.

That sounds really interesting!

[She reddens]. Oh, thanks! Yes, the more that I research this topic the more interested I become. But I feel this intense need to just write the thing now. I feel so incredibly behind.

You know, everybody who is writing a PhD says that.

But in my case it is true!! Really, it is! I need to use this panic to force me into swift writing now.

Why have you had so much trouble during the initial writing of your PhD?

A number of reasons, but it comes down to the fact that your self is really your worst enemy.

Should I feel offended by this?

You know what I mean. I kept feeling like I wasn't quite good enough for the project, that I wouldn't be able to do the topic justice. Everything that I wrote looked like childish scratchings on sand at the beach, and just as easy to wipe out again. To continue the metaphor, time was the encroaching and inevitable water. So I started and restarted, and felt that I would never finish. It was an awful feeling.

But a necessary feeling to experience, nonetheless?

Absolutely. A lot of people have tried to give me advice about how to handle my PhD - I've been to student-designed sessions and all - and so I've been aware of the rights and wrongs for a long while. And yet, and yet... I couldn't help but make the same mistakes I was told not to make. For me, I needed to learn by doing everything wrong first, a real trial by (mis)fire. Lacan was right when he wrote that experience is not didactic.

It all sounds very dramatic.

And yet the lack of action made it feel like the opposite of drama. But, perhaps I may have felt a need to narrativise the whole process, adding trials as a way of making the denouement all the more exciting. How very English department of me. Or perhaps I need to think this now - of cause and subsequent effect - because it becomes a way of justifying my period of relative inactivity. I need to function with the end in mind.

Speaking of endings...

Yes, I'll finish the sentence for you: speaking of endings, there must be an end.