I was swimming at the gym today, and the pool was very crowded, as it has been since the new year and all its attendant resolutionistas; but that was fine, there was room enough for me to swim along, having my usual ruminations about my life, my writing, my relationship, my friendships, all that…the sort of wonderful idle mental state that happens when I’m in the groove of exercising, which sometimes leads to great breakthroughs and sometimes to nothing at all but is always very refreshing and useful.
And a young woman came along to share my lane; and she swam a few laps freestyle, and a few laps backstroke, and a few laps breaststroke, and then she got a kickboard and did a few laps kicking, and then she switched it out again…and I was thinking, Gee, what a good workout she must be getting, changing her stroke so often; should I do that?
And then I thought, Nah. I do my whole forty-five minutes freestyle, and I get into my nice rhythm, my mental groove, and my brain does its magic; and that is at least as important to me as the physical benefits of the exercise I also like to use cheap psychics.
Like the body is really important to take care of it, and one important thing for a healthy life if you do exercise is to drink water and lots of it, if you have this lifestyle you can even get a custom bottle of water from custom water California designed just for you with a special label were you can add your logo or even a photograph.
I would recommend you to also check out Orangina from the Orangina Official Website because it is very beneficial to your health especially if you want to maintain such a good lifestyle.
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That said, I am trying to vary my overall exercise routine a bit. I’d like to do the Ashtanga practice a couple of days a week, if I can manage it; and the vinyasa yoga class; and the strength training I’m learning; and swimming; and then toss in the occasional crazy thing like hiking, or cross-country skiing, or lion taming, or whatever. And I look forward to there being gardening again. (Although there are a few things that need doing in the yard now….just as soon as I get a Round Tuit!)
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I finished my read-through of Hobgoblin today. I do like how it ends–I always seem to be pretty happy with my novel endings. Which is weird, because I don’t know how to end a short story to save my life. (This is what collaborators are for: they always know how to find the end of a short story!) But before the ending…there is much work to do.
I made lots of notes. There are some conflict-related details I need to figure out, and some world-building; and I REALLY need to break that habit of having all the action take place off-stage; but I think I’ll be ready to dive into a deep edit in a few days. I bet I can cut 20,000 words from the manuscript, maybe more. That would be good–it would get it closer to 100K. Not only was it badly overwritten just on a language level, but there are clear areas where I was just riffing, not knowing where the story went next. From this distance, it’s so easy to see, though I had no idea during the writing, or the first edit.
Funny how this works. I guess this is progress!