FREE Supervillain-Protagonist Story on Thanksgiving and Black Friday

For Thanksgiving and Black Friday 2016, I've made my short story "Ubermensch" FREE. Those of you interested in superheroes, supervillains, villain-protagonist stories, and diversity in speculative fiction (lead character Andrew Patel is Indian-American) should take a look.

(Alex Claw has illustrated many of my Amazon stories, which can be found here. I think "Ubermensch" is the best cover. Here's his DeviantArt account if you're looking for an artist.)

And now for some background you might find interesting. I first started writing "Ubermensch" sometime in 2011. I published it independently on Amazon in early August 2013, with the sequel "Needs Must" appearing just under two weeks later. I've got a lot of potential stories to tell with this character, as the fact I've made it a series on Amazon indicates.

If you read the story, please leave an honest review, good or bad. I've got a cover made and a fourth (but not a third) story written for a four-story Andrew Patel collection. If and when it goes up, it will tie Andrew Patel and his world in with my Lovecraftian novel The Thing in the Woods. But I'd like to know if there's sufficient interest first.

Here's the cover for the planned collection for those who'd like to know more:

Alex did this one too.

How We Can Stop "Black Friday"

This morning on Twitter, I found an article from the Washington Post headlined, "Where are the so-called 'family' organizations on Black Friday? Not where they should be." The article is written by a member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who points out that the retailers' infringing on the Thanksgiving holiday isn't exactly helping families stay together, but the organizations proclaiming "family values" aren't very vocal about it.

Let's leave the gay angle alone and focus on the main argument. Beginning "Black Friday" at midnight requires additional staffing at the stores on Thanksgiving itself. This will take retail employees away from their families on Thanksgiving itself. Even if the retailer allows time for Thanksgiving dinner itself and doesn't bring in the extra staff until just before the lunacy begins, those employees will not get the chance to rest and recover from the celebration. If someone wants to work "Black Friday" for the extra pay, that's understandable, but I suspect that doesn't apply to all of the employees working that night.


Furthermore, I am a Christian and I imagine many of my readers are as well. Do you think Jesus, who said that a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions, would appreciate the prelude to His birthday being "celebrated" by materialistic mob madness? Does it honor Him to have someone trampled to death in the rush to save a few dollars on some toy or gadget that might well end up forgotten in a few months, as so many gifts often are? If I wanted to be over-dramatic, I could claim that poor fellow was a human sacrifice to the idol of American materialistic nonsense.

Furthermore, how many people willing to stand in line for hours to get these gifts put in similar efforts to serve "the least of these"? I don't claim to be the best at committing my time to charitable use, but if everyone spent those 2-3 hours working in a soup kitchen or something else beneficial, our country would be better off.

So here's something we can do. Rather than contribute to this ridiculous, destructive frenzy and give retailers incentive to be open earlier and earlier, taking employees away from their families on a holiday intended to celebrate the often-forgotten virtue of gratitude, let's avoid waiting in line Thanksgiving evening for the midnight madness. Wait until sunrise or thereabouts. I did go to Barnes and Noble on Black Friday to get some books for a couple friends (and that Starcraft book for me), but I waited until around dinnertime.

If people didn't vote with their wallets for this idiocy to occur, it wouldn't. One of the comments referenced "family values" organizations boycotting television programs they didn't approve of. If they similarly boycotted retailers who began "Black Friday" too early--or at the very least publicly encouraged their members to skip "Black Friday" itself--it would help redeem them from the charges of selectiveness often laid at their feet and hopefully have an impact on the retailers' behavior.

Some of these groups already have begun doing this. Take a look at Focus on the Family's "Give Back Friday." Good for them.

A Thanksgiving Tree and the Virtue of Gratitude

On Facebook today, my friend Caitlin posted this picture:

It's a "thankful tree." If you look closely at it, you can see things like "music" and "Jesus." I imagine these are things members of Caitlin's family are particularly thankful for.

Something like this is a very good idea, for many reasons.

Firstly, Christmas has burst the bonds of December and expanded all the way to the day after Halloween, as satirized by one of the Simpsons Halloween episodes I saw many years ago. I remember when I was a kid seeing Thanksgiving decorations in a store (I think it was the East Cobb K-Mart, which is now a Sears), but that might have been over twenty years ago. More recently, I was shopping for a Halloween costume and saw Santa stuff in the Wal Mart. That's absurd. Halloween is October's big holiday, Thanksgiving is November's, and Christmas (or Hanukkah, if applicable) is December's.

Secondly, gratitude is a virtue many people have forgotten. Much of the election campaign hinged on complaining about our unemployment rate, which is significantly lower than countries like Spain, Greece, and to a lesser degree France. Even if one doubles it based on the idea those who have given up looking for work aren't being counted, we're still better off than Spain and Greece.

(This is not heartless sniping at the unemployed. I know from personal experience how much being unemployed sucks. My point is that we need to keep things in perspective. Look at how bad things were during the Great Depression.)

One common expression in the United States is, "God bless America," never mind that by any objective standard, God has blessed America to a rather massive degree in terms of both material wealth and personal freedom and we really ought to be thanking Him for the billions of blessings we enjoy.

(You don't have to be a Christian or even a believer in any kind of active God to believe gratitude is a good thing. Someone who is demanding and never satisfied is going to have a much more problematic life than someone more inclined to contentment and gratitude. And they're going to be much, much more annoying, like Eric Cartman. And on both an individual and a national level, it leads to living beyond one's means and the resulting problems.)

Practicing a tradition like a "thankful tree" serves two purposes. Firstly, it provides a visible marker of the Thanksgiving holiday and serves as a stand, however humble, against the overreach of Christmas. Secondly, it's an exercise in remembering all one's many blessings.