I’m nearing completion of my short story, “The Purple Girl,” a project that has dominated the summer. I’d hoped to use it to apply for grad school in the fall, but the plan was a bit too ambitious. Now I will be using it to apply for school in the spring. What had started out as an attempt to 1) tell a story from a different perspective (in this case, by writing in a female voice), and 2) discuss identity and conformity has transformed into a story that, while retaining its female narrator and identity-related themes, is also about a sort of haunting. I don’t want to say much more than that, but obviously I failed in my attempt to write something that isn’t “weird.” I can’t escape genre, no matter how hard I try.

Archie is back home and in lots of pain, but he’s alive. We haven’t lost him, yet. He looks like someone gutted him and then roughly sewed and stapled him back together. It was a bit of a shock, seeing his belly threaded with so much metal, but now I’ve gotten used to it. A friend asked me if it was worth the cost, but I feel that as his owner, I have a responsibility to try as much as possible to keep him going. I’m not sure if we could afford cancer treatment, but if this operation makes him feel better and gives us another few years with him, I’ll take it.

Lately I’ve been listening to The Mountain Goats, Final Fantasy (Owen from The Arcade Fire), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Tapes ‘n Tapes and Q and Not U. My EMusic subscription refills tomorrow, so that’s 40 more songs I get to download. EMusic has saved my life.