Anyway, yesterday was one of those days where I accidentally and unintentionally got in way more exercise than I had to. First off, swimming. If I go alone, I usually get out after about seventy minutes. But my younger brother Ashley decided he wanted to come along, and time flew much quicker since I had company. I ended up staying in the pool a full ninety minutes, only getting out because I was tired. Then, it takes me an hour to walk to the pool and back, so that was two hours and a half of exercise already. Then, Jason and I went to Sian's later on to watch a couple of films. Dad drove us there but we walked back, which took 30 minutes.
At the end of the day I was so knackered that I actually don't remember getting into bed last night. It usually takes me a full hour to get to sleep but I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow. I'm sleeping much better now that I'm more active.
So, swimming. I wasn't allowed to borrow a float but I'm actually kind of glad I didn't, because I did my usual thing of holding onto the side and swimming with the rest of me, and I noticed a definite improvement - as in, I could keep myself afloat much better, and I wasn't gripping the side as much as skimming my hand along it in case I needed to grab on to steady myself. I just did my usual laps back and forth along the side, from the shallow end to 1.25m (the limit for non-swimmers) and back again, practicing a half-breaststroke with each arm in alternation. I'm getting faster at swimming as well.
And guess what? I swam unaided as well! It was only for about three strokes, but I managed it! So in three sessions, I've managed to swim by myself a little bit. Hopefully I can manage to get a little bit further each time I go.
So, yesterday I managed to burn off 1683 calories. I had to eat 2237 to make sure I actually netted some. Which was easy; I made up for the calories I'd burned at Sian's place later, with all the food I brought to accompany our film. We watched Troll 2, which is so awful it would take me forever to review, and then a DVD of one of Sian's favourite childhood films, based on Through the Looking Glass.
I'm thinking of starting to plan for NaNoWriMo today, and I think it shall just be a continuation of The Great Couch Happening of '69. I need to plan, otherwise the novel will just fizzle out, but at the same time I need a plan which allows for some of the spontaneous craziness that makes my novel what it is. And I believe the best way to do that would be to plan in the form of notecards. I did this a couple of years ago when doing my NaNo '09, Crimson Dawn, which actually turned out quite well - I had a lot of fun writing it.
Maybe I should use notecards for my other project too... I want to revive the fantasy-romance novel that I started working on when I was thirteen - I have the storyline set out quite well in my head - and I've tried to plan it a few times just by typing out a synopsis, to no avail - when I try to write it down in plan form it just gets overly detailed and tedious. If I tried to just write it from my mind, it would just fizzle out. I need to have the plot written in some form before me, like a roadmap. Put it this way, you'd never travel to somewhere you'd never gone before without a map. My novel's the place, the plan is the map. I've never written my novel before, so I need some form of a plan to make sure I don't get lost and give up a couple of chapters in.
Right, so now I just need to find some plain paper, cut it up into eighths and get to work.