From the Diary of Young Mercedes Mace 02: "Steps of a Ghost" is published! From the back cover:

"YMM02: “Steps of a Ghost” is the second collection of short stories from the Didary of Young Mercedes Mace—the teenage adventures of the sun-sensitive girl-detective, growing up in the frigid frontier state of Alaska. This collection includes:
 
“Poor Kid Quandary (Sophomore)”: Mercy returns from winter camping to discover that she isn’t the only spectre wandering the grim perma-night of Alaska’s December…!
 
“Shooting Secret (Junior)”: Robbie—one of Mercy’s only friends—has started to pal around with Leah, the only other faux-vampire in Fairbanks. Ick. But what does she have to do with a grotesque, blood-drenched site in the middle of the woods??
 
“Prom Night Puzzle (Senior)”: With only three days before the big dance, Mercy takes a case to pay for her dress. Her client thinks his significant other is cheating on him. But trite high-school drama becomes life-scarring tragedy in the frigid winds of a cold night, black within and without!"

E-Books should be available Tues (170502), and hard-copies no later than Fri! I'll post links when active. Thank you to all of the Mercedes Mace readers!

YMM02 “Steps of a Ghost” will be delayed until April 30th, to give the last of my editors more time for review. We apologize for this third delay! But it will absolutely be released by the end of the month!
 
Let’s talk about Hearthstone. If you were unaware, HS’s new expansion released last week: ‘Journey to Un’goro’. Do I like HS? Yes, though no one would be surprised were I to express frustrations at the game. Daily frustrations. However, regardless of the value barriers Un’goro presents, I am enjoying it very much! For one, very specific reason: one very specific deck:
 
My taunt weapons warrior quest deck!  :}
 
My favorite HS class is the warrior—favorite by a wide margin! And my favorite warrior theme is a weapons-centric deck. Not ‘weapons-heavy’, but ‘-centric’: focused on as much weapon synergy as permitted by the Rank 20 meta.
 
From GvG through ONiK, one of the warrior’s class-defining features—Taunt—has been useless to the point that I never ran taunt minions. No one did. (Although I cannot find a particular article from which to source this opinion, it is commonly stated by players and in forums.) There are three reasons for this:
 
(i) Taunt has routinely been over-priced, or taunt minions are routinely under-statted. Most taunt minions have not been interesting—Sludge Belcher was the most interesting taunt minion HS had, such that everyone ran it!
 
(ii) Taunt minions, because of (i), are low-tempo propositions. HS has become a ‘faster’ [source??] game with every expansion until…well, Un’goro. Fast card games require players to maintain a certain level of momentum, or ‘tempo’, or one’s eventual defeat can be predicted as early as turn 2 or 3.
 
(iii) The warrior hero power can keep a warrior alive better than that of any other class. Given Armorsmith/Whirlwind combinations, C’thun armor decks, Reno Jackson, and Justicar Trueheart, a warrior just never really needed the security of taunt minions.
 
With low-value taunt minions, the continuous nerf of charge minions, and the nerf of one-turn-kill (OTK) enrage-based mechanisms, warriors had basically one class-defining feature: the Fiery War Axe.
 
No: the Fiery Win Axe.
 
Shit: weapons. Warriors consistently get great, common weapons with every expansion. Or passable common weapons. Every time another class gets a common weapon, that class gets apeshit over-powered. Since Blackrock, I’ve been using Reno warrior decks with some big minions (e.g. Chromaggus, Nefarian); charge enrage decks with some big minions (e.g. Chromaggus, Nefarian); since WotOG, pirate decks with some big minions (e.g. Chromaggus, Nefarian). And weapons. So many weapons, the current President would approve my budget increase.
 
My weapons warrior decks have never been Legend-quality; some months, they’re not even Rank 16 quality. But I like them very much, and I play mostly vs. Innkeeper or Dungeons. (I am sad that Blizzard anct’d that they won’t be doing any Dungeons in the coming year.)
 
When Un’goro launched, I had to copy 14 Standard decks to my archive before deleting them! Since then, I’ve only made two decks: my taunt weapons warrior quest deck, and a murloc shaman to summon 30 murlocs. Also, I got two copies of the shaman deck when I spent all of my gold buying Un’goro packs.
 
My new warrior deck is awesome! It’s a ton of fun to play, has not lost all of its PvP matches, and is interesting to the point of being viable against every other class. I must credit the HS dev team: from the perspective of warrior and shaman, they have focused Un’goro around these quests while still introducing a wide variety of mechanics. Most of the new taunt minions are interesting and fun to play, and Sulfuras with its associated change in hero power could not be more fantastic and apropos to weapons-centric warrior decks and play-styles!
 
P.S. I don’t normally gush about HS—on a given day, I may not even like HS—but the HS team deserves 600 words of my praise and excitement for making a new warrior archetype enjoyable and engaging.

Recall that ‘Anct’ is the 100% Official Super Accurate Approved Acme AAA #1 A+ Gold Star Medal English abbreviation for ‘announcement’.  ;P  (DJ Trump: this is not real news. Please do not Tweet this.)
 
This anct comprises four items:
 
(1) YMM02 gets published this coming Saturday! Please tell all 40,000 of your Twits! If you don’t have 40,000 twits, we’ll have to play Horus Heresy. If you get that joke, you are awesome. I don’t have anything free to give you yet. I will remedy that.
 
(2) Instead of trying to find places to give readings, I’m trying to contact ten book clubs in April to ask them to read one of my books. If you have a favorite book club to which you listen/belong, please let me know about it!
 
(3) Pay attention to GoodReads (and/or here!) toward the end of April; following the release of YMM02, I’ll be hosting my first GoodReads giveaway!
 
(4) I’ll talk about Hearthstone and the new Un’goro expansion later this week.

Apparently, there are no fantastic abbreviations for ‘announcement’. ‘Ann.’, ‘anncmnt.’, and ‘RSVP’ were the three routine answers to my query. The latter does not count—‘repondez s’il vous plait’ does not translate to ‘announcement’! ‘Anncmnt’ is barely an abbreviation, and Anne is my middle name. I’m going to borrow Colbert’s big hat:
 
"Henceforth, ‘Anct’ will be the official abbreviation for ‘announcement’! It shall be accepted as canonical English the world over."
 
I have spoken! Or typed.
 
* Anct the First: YMM02: “Steps of a Ghost” is delayed two more weeks; it’ll be available on April 15th (170415). Someone be surprised. Be surprised @MercedesMace.
 
* Anct the Second: MM05 has been confirmed! Expect it Jan 2018!  :}
 
That’s it for now. I was going to post a monologue about how people don’t use social media as ‘Social Media’; it may still happen, but I like to have people look over my stuff before I post it.

P.S. I am an idiot for choosing to post this on April 1st.  /facepalm  But, if you like stories about April Fool's...!