MY SMALL PRESS WRITING DAY, by Lituo Huang

          My writing day begins at 4:00 a.m., or sometimes 5:00 a.m., or 6:00 a.m., or 7:00 a.m., or 8:00 a.m., when I wake up with anxiety. The first writing I do is in a notebook where I write down when I went to bed. When I woke up. If and when I fell back asleep and woke up again. How tired I am.

         

          Then I write in my journal. I write about my anxieties.

          But you wanted to hear about my writing writing.

          Most days, I write write in the IKEA chair and ottoman set I bought used for $12. This chair is not particularly comfortable, but it is the most comfortable chair I own. The writing happens in the evening, after I have put the anxieties of the day away, turned my phone and watch facedown on my desk, put my wall clock inside the towel drawer of the dresser inside my closet. Time stops for an hour or two. I write in a notebook or on lined notebook paper that I keep in a three-ring binder. I Work On My Novel for 100, 200, 300 handwritten words as my dogs sleep by my feet, the lucky idiots. This is my practice of writing, which I find laborious in the extreme. I used to try to do this every day. Now I try not to do it every day.

          But some days, for reasons unknown to me, I actually want to write. On those days, I quick-scrawl poems in my notebook after walking my dogs in the afternoon. I write in the driver’s seat of my car in a church parking lot, under a light. I barf wholesale stories up on my hated laptop in the span of three hours on a work night. I am wild with it.

          On the remaining days, I submit to journals or revise.

          And then before bed, I put the day to sleep in my journal until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore, and I get into bed, and I wait.

Lituo Huang lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of a chapbook of poetry and short fiction, This Long Clot of Love. Her stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in JMWW, Hermine, the VIDA Review, Bosie Magazine, the Recenter Press Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is working on her first novel. www.lituohuang.com Twitter: @LituoH