It's too early. Jason stayed at mine last night but we had to get up early since he has another work placement, this time transporting medical records around Warrington Hospital. I am le tired, but I'm terrible at going back to bed once I'm awake. I'll just lie there, tired, but totally unable to sleep. Later on, I'm going to his to stay over.

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.