Day 10 - I printed it out.

I shouldn't have done that. I think it's against the rules, but I was getting really confused. So I did it. The trouble is, now I want to take out my red pen and start making  notes, crossing things out, editing. No, no. I know for a fact that that is against the rules, as well it should be. If I start editing at this point, I will never get to 50,000 words. The thing to do now is take the duo-tang with all the printed pages in it, and put it in a closet until December 1. At least now I know that if my Writing Nook and my e-mail both go belly-up in the next couple of weeks, I will still have a copy of what I've written to date. Maybe once a week I should do this, just to reassure myself.

Meanwhile, Marie (my MC's daughter) has completely hijacked the story and wandered off, meeting interesting people and squirrels and getting herself involved in a bit of a mystery, and I'm left standing here saying "Hey! What happened to my story?" I gather that my experience is not unusual in the world of NaNoWriMo, and I'm not particularly worried about it, but it has required some deep breathing on my part to accept my marginalization. I must trust that at some point Marie will remember that she has a mystery of her own to solve, and she will get back to work at solving it.

Today's word count: 2,155. To date: 21,977.

And meanwhile, we have a bit of a problem here. I woke up this morning to a very strange odor in the house, which turned out to be coming from the water heater. We have arranged to have a plumber come in, but he can't come until Thursday afternoon, so in the meantime, I guess we'll have to turn on the water heater a couple of times a day, just long enough to heat water for showers and dishes, and leave it turned off the rest of the time. If worse comes to worst, we'll go to the Aquatic Centre for our showers. That would give me a chance to try out my new bathing suit (an early Christmas present) at the pool. Tomorrow, we're heading to Victoria for the day, so we'll be eating out. Thank goodness. No dishes.

Oh. And I found some Jergens self-tanning lotion, and I've started using it, so that by the time we fly to Hawaii in mid-January (Did I mention that?) I will have lost my Canadian fish-belly whiteness and everybody will think I'm an island girl.  (Well, I am, but this island isn't tropical. Not right now, anyway.)