Yesterday I chopped down a tree. It was a bottlebrush, and lately it had been dying off for some reason. It was a great tree, but we didn’t know how to save it so we decided to get rid of it before green waste day. I did most of the chopping with a little red hatchet, which turned out to be just as fast as a saw and a lot less annoying - I’m no good at saws - so I’m planning to get a proper axe next time. When the tree came down, I could barely lift it to drag it to the kerb. The stump looked like a cartoon beaver had eaten it.

Anyhoo, I’m halfway through NaNoWriMo, and I’m just keeping ahead of the target word counts. This *is* a very hard task, seeing as I put way too much time into it and I’m only just getting it done. The next section will be much less reasonable, and I’m planning to just write whatever comes into my head, rather than having a complex plot like in part 1. I wonder if that will speed me up or slow me down?

Oh, and all of you suffering from comment spam: solidarity, brothers. I know your pain.