Thesis... Done.

This, my friends, is the rather unpretentious, unimpressive first page of the culmination of two years' work. I am unabashedly thrilled.

Yes, the thesis is done. Yes, I can stop using words like "thesis" and "grad school" and get back to normal conversational words. If I can remember them.

Can you believe it's been two years? Me either. On the other hand, I can't remember what it was like not to be in school. Which is what my kids think when I say, "That two years went fast," and they reply, "Was it just two years??"

The last five months writing this thesis have been crazy. Head in laptop, eyes blurred, four-hour-a-night sleep kind of crazy. Non-stop writing and revising and crying and despairing and tiny leaps of hope followed by roller-coaster freefalls of doubt kind of crazy. But here it is... five short stories I've become mightily attached to.

I don't know what will happen from here. We're into the holiday season, so I suspect there will have to be some non-laptop time that involves cleaning and shopping and decorating, but I don't know how to function without a laptop calling me constantly. I keep wandering back to it, opening it, staring as though something important will leap out at me.

I have two novels rolling around in my head that I suspect I'll get knee-deep into before I return to Oregon in January. One is an old one I think I finally have a good direction for, and another is a new one that's more a seed still growing roots in my brain.

I feel both huge relief... and a little lost. Glad to say goodbye to stress of school, but depressed at saying goodbye to the promise of residencies, friends, letters from advisors, and that learning high that makes my brain feel like it's exploding.

Now to figure out what life will be from here on out...