Welcome to the next guest blogger, EJ Frost! She's the fabulous author of Snowburn, an awesome sci-fi romance and Black Magic Friday, the book she's talking about today. I love how she equates shopping to the urge to hunt and gather--something I'd never considered before.
But what am I yammering on about...check out her post after the jump!
Welcome to S. Usher Evans's blog! Where is she? Ah, well, we've swapped blogs today. She's at my blog, here, talking about Alliances. She's given me free rein on her blog today (wee!).
Alliances concerns strong relationships between women. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, so I thought I'd focus on a short story I wrote not long ago in connection with a new urban fantasy series that begins with Neon Blue. The story is Black Magic Friday, and it has at its heart the relationship between my narrator, Tsara, and her best friend, Lin.
Black Magic Friday starts with a shopping trip. We can disparage "retail therapy" as crass consumerism, but shopping is a great bonding activity. It's a very ancient activity. As a ritual, a trip to the mall is little different from an excursion into the wild to gather raw materials, which women have done together for tens of thousands of years. The activity of gathering--searching, selecting and collecting--is the same. And doing it with other women creates a sense of teamwork, of community, that other activities don't. That bonding is at the heart of Black Magic Friday.
There's also a competitive element to shopping. Maybe there always has been. Maybe there was competition from the neighboring tribe or village for the best shells, berries, and flint. Now we compete for the best bargain, or this season's high-waisted jeans. That competition was also something I wanted to explore in Black Magic Friday, so I set the story during that most competitive of shopping days, the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Tsara and Lin's shopping expedition is soon interrupted by supernatural weirdness. But not before I had a lot of fun with the insanity that is Black Friday, and the strong friendship between Tsara and Lin, which only grows stronger as they fight off the crowds for Egyptian cotton towels and designer hand bags.
Writing Black Magic Friday was a blast, and called to mind many happy afternoons shopping with my friends, and now with my teenaged daughter and her friends. I hope readers will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Have a competitive shopping story? Share it in the comments!
You can buy "Black Magic Friday" on Amazon.
Stalk E. J. Frost on Facebook and Twitter.
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