Using pretty permalinks with custom query_post commands

Since I want to exclude a category on my main blog page, I use the following as my query for posts:

query_posts('cat=-3&showposts=10');

Now, how can I change this so that when a user clicks <<Previous Posts and sees https://www.myblog.com/page/2, it shows the 10 previous posts? I thought I might be able to do this using the &paged=$var argument, but I can’t figure out how to get the page number out of the pretty permalink URL.

Thanks in advance!