Canada: Day Eight. Million.

Okay, so I'll say upfront that I haven't gotten any prose pages done. Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday. Yes. I know.

However, I have finished the play. Yes. It is done. So that's 73 pages worth of play. And now that's done and out of my head and I think I can get back to work on the whole "BP" (big project) thing.

I'm also up here on my own now. Uncle and Aunt back in Toronto. They'll be back Friday. Honestly, it's weird. Weirder than I thought it would be. I'm really...all alone. In the woods. By a lake. For the first time ever, I'm freaking out about bears and psychotic killers. Isn't this how most horror movies start? A writer goes to a solitary retreat, but LITTLE DOES SHE KNOW...

I mean, okay, it's not that bad: the neighbors, whom we are friends with, are very close by and swim by pretty much every day and said I could call anytime if I wanted a ride into town. And I can bike into town really easily. And I have the internet. And the landline. But still...

I'm doing my darnedest to eat real meals and stick to a schedule and be active and not wallow in my own filth. But you all know I'm not good at those things at the best of times, let alone when the accountability is precisely zip.

Good things I have done:
(1) Made a delicious salad, dressing from scratch, with smoked trout (haven't axed trout from the list of Fishes I'm Not Eating, yet).
(2) Made portobello mushroom/tomato thing that was delicious.
(3) Went swimming twice on Sunday and biked into town. And did yoga on the boathouse.
(4) Remembered to put the sheets down on the porch furniture when it started raining.
(5) Finished play.
(6) Read Patrimony, by Phillip Roth.
(7) Started Under the Volcano. Has made me think about very useful things regarding novel structure.

Bad things I have done:
(1) Located and watched episodes of Secret Diary of Call Girl and Weeds.
(2) Tracked down all chocolate and ice cream in cottage yesterday and consumed it.
(3) Ditto for leftover rice pudding and macaroni pie.
(4) May also have eaten much breakfast cereal yesterday, not at breakfast times.
(5) Perhaps because I had slept in past social acceptable breakfast times.
(6) In part because rain had woken me up at 4:30 am, at which time I remembered I had not put sheets down on porch furniture. Sprinted over to cottage from cabin in the rain to do so, also to unplug all electronics. At which point I was so discombobulated that I
(7) Read Our Man in Havana (anyone seen this movie, by the way? So good) until morning. As sun rose, went back to sleep.
(8) See beginning of blog, re: no prose writing. Though lots of prose thinking? Thinking about prose?
(9) Reading books like Patrimony, Under the Volcano, and Our Man in Havana rather than Infinite Jest; also being dilatory in posting about Infinite Jest.

I think it's fair to say that the bad outweighs the good. But tomorrow is always another day to tip the balance.