you can do it on just three hours a day

"... three hours a day is all that's needed to write successfully. Writing is turning time into language, and all good writers have an elaborate, fetishistic relationship to their working hours. Writers talking about time are like painters talking about unprimed canvas and pigments. (Nor is there anything philistine about writers talking money. Inside the ballroom at the PEN banquet, it's all freedom and dignity; outside, it's all advances.)"

Adam Gopnik, "Trollope Trending," New Yorker, May 4, 2015

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Already Missing Him

I am trying not to look at the calendar. I am trying not to think: In less than three weeks, my boy will be back at school, in a dorm, in his classes. My boy, who stops to see, who leans in to inquire, who walks to this side of my desk, plants a kiss on my forehead, and says, "You are looking so pretty today." No matter what I am wearing, no matter my hair, no matter what I see when I dare to see myself.

He has been writing all summer long. Yesterday I went out for three hours. When I returned he had 11 new pages, done.

"Eleven new pages?" I said. "But that's impossible."

"Not if you figure it all out before you start typing," he said.

Figure it out before you start typing, I thought. Figure it out.

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