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Freaky Friday

My children used to think that it was exciting to get up at 4 a.m. and go out shopping on so-called Black Friday - the day apparently consecrated to holiday sales.

Then, one of my daughters saw a stampede at an electronics store, in which a woman’s leg was broken – and that put a stop to that. Nowadays, Black Friday has an unintended and unsavory eponymous reputation due to the mayhem that can break out when war is made over who rightfully can claim the last deeply discounted flatscreen TV.

All of this prompts the question as to why people consider it unseemly to do their holiday shopping year round, at times when they may have gone to diverting and unusual places where diverting and unusual things were for sale. Why wait until the last days of the "shopping season" to fight over a space heater at a box store, five miles from your house?

As one who does not go to stores at all, the idea of a retail siege is deeply anathema. I vividly remember my last foray. I gave in to my husband’s pleas for me to go and look at stoves, only to lose the stove I was in the process of buying when a salesperson wheeled it away - and sold it to someone else. 

I would love it if every gift I gave or received was handmade or handwritten. But since I am no better able to make a gift, even a potholder from a kit, than I was at the age of seven, this is no solution. Further, I am horrified by the prospect of stockings filled with gift cards. I love giving gifts - and yet have acute mall-a-phobia.

People like me are precisely why they invented Etsy. - JM

Hot Life Tip

For someone who makes her living with words (or for anyone), I’m singularly horrible at Scrabble and crossword puzzles. No one believes this. But my semi-illiterate 16-year-old can beat me like a drum. However, many people I respect suggest doing these, not only to make sure that you don’t lose your marbles, but to make sure your vocabulary keeps growing. So many people, in fact, that I actually bought a book of them.

Hot Recipe Tip

Hot Writing Tip

Try outlining your plot. I know! (Everyone thinks it’s death to creativity.) But you don’t have to stick to an outline religiously. Let it be a guide instead. You wouldn’t drive from New England to Wyoming without ever glancing at highway directions - even if you make ten side trips off the beaten path.

Outline in big chunks, this way: use bullet points to sketch in, for example, the four big events in Part One. Do the same for Part Two and Part Three.

I guarantee you will feel free, rather than confined. 

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