A public congrats to Ceri for not only hitting her goal of 8,900 words, but surpassing it for a running total of 9,115.

Yay, Ceri!

I was out last night and I picked up a couple of books that my protagonist examines closely over the course of my novel. I already own copies of these particular books, but there was no way I was going to use them as reference. So, new copies were purchased (I did try to find them second-hand, but five second-hand stores later, I knew I was out of luck) and I brought them home to break them in.

My mother (this is related, honest) trained as a documentation technologist, which is to a librarian as a dental hygenist is to a dentist: they do all the work, and the university graduate gets the credit and the plumper paycheque. One of the things she learned was how to prepare new books for the shelf, and for library binding. She taught me how they do it, and it simultaneously fascinated me and horrified me.

Here’s what you do: you hold your book spine down, find approximately the middle, and crack it open. Yep. Bend that virgin spine to the book lies completely flat. Then choose one side or the other and divide that section in half, and snap it open again, then do the other side. You keep diving the sections in half and snapping them open so finally, the book will flex smoothly and you’ll have no trouble turning pages. As a rule of thumb, there should be a snap every fifty pages or so.

I’m obsessive about my personal library, and in my world, to snap a spine is to break the book. It’s interesting to note that of all the people I used to lend books out to (it doesn’t happen often any more, trust me), those who handed them back with broken spines are no longer in my circle of friends. Hmm. Coincidence? Maybe.

So to sit down last night and snap these spines ruthlessly so I could mark them up with pens and markers and sticky notes was a big step on my part. I mean, I didn’t even do this to my university texts, although I did finally concede defeat and begin making light pencil marks in them. You can see why I had to have second copies, though.

Then I went to bed at about midnight. I woke up at around five (we think) to my husband sitting bolt upright in bed to say, “The power’s out.” Sure enough, I could hear the slow beep of the fire alarm battery in the front hall, which, when you’re still partially asleep, really sounds like a delivery truck backing up. Then he said, “Wow, it’s snowing.” So I pulled the curtain aside, and it was a winter wonderland out there – at least three inches of snow was piling up. “Pretty,” I said, and lay back down.

And then, the realisation that if the power was out for long, there would be no NaNoing today, despite the fact that I had a new adapter for my notebook computer.

Was the power outage city-wide? Would NaNos all over Montreal shake their fists at Hydro-Quebec and wail? Was the problem local, i.e. a snow-laden tree leaning against a power line, or distant, i.e. James Bay has been snowed in? And then, as I fell asleep, a most heartfelt feeling of gratitude for not being caught at the computer when the power failed welled up in my heart.

Although when I woke up at eight the snow had stopped, it’s begun again. My husband the Weather Channel addict tells me that by Saturday it’s supposed to be 13� C again, which means rain and mucky messes for a few days. Ah, November. Changeable, fickle, and you don’t even have the redeeming factor of a holiday in there somewhere….