What revision?

This month is supposed to be about revision for me. Revision plus a new story about a nipple. My butt's kicked into high gear. (Or something.)

The story I'm revising got workshopped again by my other small writing group, as some people weren't there or hadn't gotten the story the first time around.

I am now very confused; for some reason my brain is not wrapping around the idea of revising the piece. Every day for the past several years I've felt like I've been losing something of myself, and losing things I didn't even know I was losing. Lately life has been very full for me, in the sense that the things I'm gaining are actually staying with me---but today the "losing" feeling is back.

I am good at revising a story fragment. In fact, let me be so bold as to say that I am excellent at that. We all should be. For me, a story fragment is a quick plotting of a scene, and very little, if anything, should remain by the time one has expanded the scene into a full-blown story.

I expanded a theater scene into longer scenes, then expanded those scenes into an actual story, which is very different from that first scene, where a man's view of the stage is obstructed by a woman's large head of hair. But now that I've declared it to be a story, even though I know very well it's far from finished, I don't want to touch it. Not because it's so precious, but because I don't know what's the next step. Somebody in the writing group said, "What month is this story set?" and I added at the very beginning of the story "That May . . ." I'm looking at the problems in the story very literally, and that's not helpful at all.

Somebody else spouted something rather abstract---and I get it but I also don't get it. I don't know what to do with this material that has so much potential.

This is all very unnecessarily vague and loosely jointed. But I am, after all, an unnecessarily vague and loosely jointed entity.

Maybe I need to take a shower.

Forgive the ramble. It's 7:30 a.m., I'm anxious about this revision, I have to introduce a writer at a reading tonight who will be surprised (happily, I hope) by a musical performance by the other writer, and immediately afterward I have to ready the apartment for dear Viet's visit tomorrow. This doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't, but I am feeling overwhelmed, so it actually is. Fingers crossed that I can gain some perspective at the office today, where work is light again (finally) and the twenty-two-year-old has somewhat backed off.