Read a Raymond Carver story, yesterday - "Careful," about a seperated husband and wife. Crisp prose. I think it works because it carefully balances deep emotional intimacy with all the problems in the marriage, so simultaneously you can see why they're together and why they aren't together. The husband has moved into a little apartment by himself, and has cut down his drinking habit to only champagne (he thought this would encourage him to drink less). The central event in the story is that the husband's ear has filled with wax and now he can't hear anything, and his wife comes over to discuss things and she ends up trying to help him get the wax out. It's really beautiful. There's just this idea of the communication gap expressed in a relatively unexpected way with the fact that they have to deal with this first, before they can talk to each other and understand each other. It encouraged me, because stories always encourage me.
The short story revisions are finally back on track, I think. I'm still working on that opening scene, the new one. I don't know. The event is, to me, a compelling image and I want to play with it more. I like the drag king and am almost sad that this moment is all we really get of her, but she has to just be part of that one scene, she has to part of that sequence at the beginning that starts everything. I'm still very much living inside the story.
Michael and I ran into Debbie on the bus home last night, after the Oktoberfest party at Jake's house. She talked about why she had to drop the fiction workshop and all of the stress she was going through, and then she got off the bus and I made sure to say that I wanted to hang out with her more. Michael observed that she's a very genuine person, and that's very true. Anyway, we were drunk on beer and on a bus with a lot of stupid Residence Kids and then we got off and stumbled home to watch ten minutes of Leela, Fry, Bender, and Zoidberg fighting an army of replicant Lucy Liu drones.