I didn’t like what I wrote today.

That’s the hardest thing. But I have to keep going, getting the words out so that later I can return to them and make them better, or cut them completely.

It’s back story that causes the problems for me. I think of the words I wrote today as notes that I can then turn into scenes where the story is shown, rather than told, as it is in the notes. When I was writing for theatre, a sin that I fell into from time to time was to make a character to say ‘I feel so x emotion’ rather than set up a dramatic situation that showed that the character was so x emotion. Same in a novel. I must never forget this.

In the end, I take the two easy steps from my desk to the garden and pull up all the borage that has rampaged over my carefully planted flower beds. I tell my friend Lisa that I have done this, and she says it’s a pity, because her herbalist husband Max could have used it for a tincture for sweaty and nervous people if I had saved it till Sunday when I am going to see them. Another friend says that it is full of oil for mad women. Bum. Could’ve done with that.