One of the more recent November phenomenons is the UK’s adoption of Black Friday. It’s quite a strange concept that a country that does not celebrate Thanksgiving should so emphatically embrace Black Friday, when there is no obvious rationale for doing so.
Well there is one ratrionale and that is to sell stuff to people at prices which are not really any cheaper than normal, but are made to seem cheaper by an artifical concept that doesn’t bear much scrutiny. But because our Black Friday does not have anything to do with Thanksgiving, beyond the fact that, as in the US, it does happen on the day after Thanksgiving (has been celebrated in the US), it doesn’t really fall on a day when people are off work. Indeed most people will be in work on Black Friday and therefore not in shops.
It matters not though, because our UK Black Friday is preceded by a week of shops offering disingenuous discounts and retailers have come to declare that week to be ‘Black Friday Week’. And that starts tomorrow. On a Friday which is a different Friday to Black Friday.
I only know this because I’ve received quite a few emails from retailers inviting me to part with my hard-earned cash in honour of this most treasured of UK events. I rarely recieve emails from actual people anymore.
To my mind, the only thing that makes less sense than ‘Black Friday Week” is the notion of attempting to write an entire novel in a month.
And yet I’m attempting and failing to do that in honour of NaNoWriMo. And then blogging about my efforts in honour of NaBloPoMo.
So I might as well pick up a bargain in the Black Friday Week pre-sale, which apparently starts today.
Before wasting my money though, I should update you on my novel-writing efforts. It’s another day when I’ve written circa 500 words (536 to be exact), which is increasingly my modus operandi. I’m now up to 13,614 in total. This is some way short of being a novel and indeed slightly too short to be considered a novella. But it does fall neatly into the category of novelette, which is a category I discovered for the first time today.
I feel that novelette might be a category I could get on board with as a writer.
James Proclaims! 