A coconut candle, woolly mammoths and keeping your feet on the ground

I haven't been writing regularly since before Christmas. 'Writing regularly' is writing four or five mornings a week, for an hour or more. Little and often is the only way for me to get the work done.

This has been because of a combination of personal stuff and The Letters coming out - the blog tour kept me pretty busy, and becoming a 'proper publisher author' (whatever that means) can mess with your head a little.

I'm getting back to it this week, accompanied by a sweet-smelling coconut candle. For me, working on something current is the best way of keeping my feet on the ground. It helps with rejection and all the difficult bits of being a writer, and it also helps with the good stuff - praise, excitement - which can be just as destabilising. If not more. I'm looking forward to spending time with my character Joe again.

Another gift from Sage's beautiful book has been the url to sign up for daily emails from The Writer's Almanac with that lovely man Garrison Keillor. A free poem delivered to your inbox every day! Here is yesterdays - another reminder for us to remember our place in the world. You can sign up for the emails here.

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Mammoth

Returning the refilled feeder to its hanger on the tree,
I am followed, and from my first step out the door
to the careful slipping of the loop of twine over the hook's tang
made to understand – as he darts within inches of my eyes –
that this hummingbird, while he may not despise me,
finds my human dawdling not simply unacceptable but offensive,
a lumbering no less appalling than the moonscape of my face
and its billion plumbable pores. Even the vast tidal wash
of my infernal, slow-witted breathing disgusts him. Therefore he loops
so swiftly around me I can hardly blink, and when I tell him he is
beautiful, he hears only the two ton roar of a woolly mammoth
as it thrashes in a bog, at the edges of which, this time of year,
the red, sweet flowers he loves most of all still thrive.

by Robert Wrigley

(from Earthly Meditations. © Penguin, 2006)