ANOTHER HOLDOUT APPEARS.

Ladies and gentlemen of the blog, I am finally announcing my project, which I suspect has been in the works since last November, or perhaps even further back: when I was eight years old.
When I was first handed these seven pages of summer assignment in June (?...or maybe it was May?), I began to feel a little troubled for a split second. No wait, that's an understatement. I freaking PANICKED. WHAT?! THINK OF AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THESE TWO BOOKS? EH???
Then my mind quickly rebounded and realized the teacher was talking about thinking of a task to complete over the summer, not a project directly related to the reading assignments. lol nvm.
But I was faced with a difficult question: what was I going to do? What sort of project could I come up with that would take me through the summer AND that I could relate to this Barbara Kingsolver book about living for a year on locally and personally grown foods?
As I drifted towards my locker after class ended and everyone was filing out into the halls, a (to quote a Green Day song older than I am) thought burst in my head: "Write a novel."
Eh? What? ...Oh...I see...it would take me just that long, wouldn't it, if I really buckled down?.....yes....yes....I COULD! I COULD! OH MY GOD, THERE IT IS!
You see, when I was eight years old, my mother decided to home school me. She herself was not a teacher. So she had to come up with some way to TEACH me and keep me entertained at the same time, because of course she was not a skilled instructor, and that classroom structure was no longer there for me, and I could come and go as I pleased, and be easily distracted by the fact that I was in my house and had total freedom. (Plus my dog.) And one of her interesting ideas was to insert vocabulary words into little mystery stories she had written featuring me and my ventriloquist's dummy, a Charlie McCarthy doll. I was thrilled by these stories and wanted them to keep coming. Eventually ma suggested that I try writing one myself, because I was always an avid reader, plus I come from generations of Irish yarn spinners, and she wanted to see if I carried the storytelling gene. So I tried my hand at it. I carried the gene, folks, if you ask my mother. She loved my writing and encouraged me to present her with more of it. And since then I've had a love of writing. Although I've always wanted to write a full-length novel, or at least a novella, I've never found the time to dedicate to it. This assignment provides it, however.
But now the question was what would I write about? I wanted to do something in the suspense vein. So I transferred something I had been working on for a while to this assignment. Although, this particular project always presented a problem for me in the way of I could not figure out how to tie the elements of the story together. I have written bits and pieces, but cannot figure out how they come together in my mind. And so for a while I dwelt on a possibility: should I even try to continue with this for my assignment?
Last week I decided against it. For I hit upon something I am even more keen to embark on.
I will write a novel based upon my experiences as a first-time Black Friday shopper at the Best Buy in Mount Clemens on Thanksgiving, 2009. Yeah, roll your eyes, I'm one of THOSE people. The people who rush to a store at five in the morning and stampede inside and trip and fall and fight other people for the significantly-marked-down item they want. Well, not really, actually...
My friend---who had previously gone Black Friday shopping, long ago, although I don't think it was on this scale--- suggested to me one lovely fall evening that maybe we could take a trip to the Best Buy for their Black Friday deals. Maybe we would go early in the morning THE DAY BEFORE THEY OPENED. Yes, we would be getting there early, the DAY BEFORE they opened, at ten in the morning, and we would spend the night there, on the sidewalk, in the bitter, uncaring cold. This way, my friend reasoned, we would be first in line. And that means, we would get what we wanted. Best Buy has a ticketing system, in order to prevent the chaos usually associated with Black Friday. The employees go down the line with tickets for the items on sale. Once the store opens, everyone files in, having a "permit"to get what they want. Unfortunately, people at the very back of the line will likely find themselves shafted, because by the time they are reached, the tickets will probably have run out. Now, the item I wanted (*coughPS3cough*) , strangely enough, was not ticketed, but when I went in to claim one I saw no one fighting over them and no one fought me for mine, so I was all right.
It was cold. It rained. My friend's mom dropped us off, and we two were all alone for a while, but first in line. We survived, later with the help of great neighbors in the line who let us borrow tents and car heaters, etc. etc.
At around 5 p.m., Natalie Sentz from WDIV-TV came, armed with a cameraman, and confronted a nearly-empty parking lot and people burrowed in their tents.
Then she saw me step out from a tent.
My neighbors were a bit nervous, if I remember correctly, but for some reason I wasn't. I volunteered to go out and introduce myself to the reporter. She ended up interviewing me and a neighbor with whom I shared a tent. Yes, that's right. I was on TV. I have a clown nose that Sentz gave me (in promotion of the Thanksgiving Parade which WDIV broadcasts) to prove it.
Eventually, my friend's mom came back, with Thanksgiving cuisine and plenty of coffee, which we gladly downed (we had run out of the food I had brought some time before). By the time the hour of 4 a.m. rang in, I was dozing off in the back of my friend's mom's car, covered with my coat (a style of covering up learned from my father), listening to WWJ 950 reports on people like me, my feet were freezing, but I felt fine, somehow. My friend---who had opted to stay outside--- came to get me when the manager and employees arrived. At 5 a.m., the doors opened, and I got my PS3 and my friend got his item and we hit the road. It really was an adventure, and certainly one not to forget.
Overall, my goal with this project is to complete a novel, and within that novel, record experiences to someday share with a publishing company and hopefully after that a nation of readers. I will show you the entire process: brainstorming, plotting characters and events, figuring out where the story is going next, etc. And I will be utilizing all of those issues of The Writer (a must for burgeoning writers, BTW) which I have accumulated over the course of many months. I cannot wait to get started on this one, and of course I cannot wait to share the process with everyone here.


tl;dr: I'm going to write a novel based on my experiences on Black Friday, 2009 at a Best Buy, waiting to buy a PS3. Fiction. Comedic.