A renewed commitment

I admit it, I fell off the blogging wagon. First I was getting ready to be away from a week from work and home, then I went to the Bahamas for Christmas, then I came home and caught up only to leave again to go to my last (sad!) MFA residency. But now I'm back, my writing batteries super recharged, and I'm ready to post!

I'll start with my ubiquitous list of writerly things to do:

This semester I'm putting together my thesis. Yikes! That means I'll be revising 5 short stories and 2 short short stories, getting them to a finished state (whatever that means!).

The first one I'm working on is called Sit, Stay. It's the first story I wrote for the program, more than 18 months ago. It's about a woman who runs a dog pound who befriends a woman who has come to drop off a puppy that was thrown from a moving van in front of her house. Both of the women are fragile, though, because of recent personal losses, and even forming a friendship is difficult for them, it makes them feel very vulnerable. Some questions I need to answer before I can revise:

Whose story is this?

If it's Tracey's (the woman who works at the pound, and whose point of view the story is now told from), what changes in her? What does this episode mean to her?

Should the story be in first person? Or should it be in third so I can follow both women?

What's at stake for the characters?

I just reread the story, and even though I wrote it so long ago, I'm finding it hard to think about tearing it apart, though I think my first step should be rewriting it from the third person POV and seeing what that does. Wish me luck!