Black Friday

I always wondered why the day after tomorrow is called Black Friday. It seems like a negative term, like Black Monday when the stock market crashed back in 1987, or the movie Black Sunday. I finally looked it up and now know that it is the day that starts the period when merchants are expected to move into the black for the year—become profitable. We always get the day off from work, so tomorrow begins a four-day weekend. Don’t expect to find me anywhere near a retail establishment of any kind on Friday. I’m not big on vying with overzealous shoppers for breathing space.

I finally came up with a concluding sentence for the short story I’ve been working on with a pair of editors for the past week or so. Two of them, in fact, which the editors promptly suggested reducing to one. I had to really get inside the head of my character and figure out what the last moment of the story meant to her and sum it up in a sentence. I knew what she was doing and why she was doing it, but to summarize it in something punchy, pithy and memorable took a lot of doing.

I established contact with the editor who e-mailed me yesterday with a proposal, and also passed her contact info along to my agent. I might have some news to report in due course, if things work out.

NCIS ended with a shocker last night. I didn’t see that coming at all. I thought Gibbs, even wounded like he was, would make the spectacular shot that would end the standoff. In a way, he did, but with terrible consequences. The Mentalist was pretty good, but I thought the ending was a little glib, as if Jane’s gesture would solve the family’s problems. I liked the scene where he was loitering near the vehicles during the SWAT invasion, looking like a fifth wheel. Unfortunately, the previews spoiled the punch line on that scene.

Dexter is nearing the end of the season. Here are my thoughts on this week’s show:

I was hoping that Miguel hadn’t done what it looked like he was planning to do at the end of episode 8. I thought that it was going to be a bluff and that he would end up sleeping with the defense lawyer instead of carrying out his vendetta. The scenes with the Confidential Informant after he had huge patches of skin removed from his back: Big Ouch! That looked so real and painful. There was one bit of poor plotting, I thought: that the cops would release their prime suspect without placing him under surveillance. They had to go through this complicated plot to pressure the other guy into spilling the beans when they could have just followed the skinner straight to his lair. They could have caught him in the act, and wouldn’t have had to put out an APB after he fled the scene.

So the shirt has cow blood on it. Interesting. Is Miguel going to mess with Dexter as payback? The scene where Dexter goes berserk was a teeny bit of a cheat on the audience, I thought. Effective at conveying his emotion, but a cheat nonetheless. I’m eager to find out how Dexter resolves his situation. Miguel’s a pretty high profile guy to have disappear, but it seems like the only solution to the mess he’s gotten himself into. He should have listened to his dead father.