Happy Ultimate 빼빼로 Day, everyone! For those not in the know, Pepero is a delicious Korean snack that started out as a pack of simple chocolate-covered cookie sticks, but that now comes in many different flavors and varieties. (My favorite is the nude Pepero, though I'm also partial to the almond-studded kind.) It's Pepero Day because today's date, 11/11, looks like a bunch of upright Pepero, and it's Ultimate Pepero Day because the year is '11 as well! CLEARLY THIS MOST HOLY OF DAYS WAS SANCTIFIED BY THE GODS.


Note: I am not yet lush enough to keep Jameson in my home office; I use the canister to hold my knitting needles*.
*"Knitting needles" is not code for "MOAR whiskey."
Ye of little faith.
Other than being a great sales month for Lotte Confectionary, November is also known as the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, for which thousands of masochists around the world commit to penning at least 50,000 words within the span of a month. 50k words in 30 days?! This is madness! you may (rightly) cry, to the inevitably zealous response of, THIS. IS. NANO!


I have a confession to make, dear readers: I am, for the most part, a slow writer. It may be more accurate to say that I am, in fact, a  s l o w  w r i t e r. (I say "for the most part" because it's occurred to me that everything I wrote here was pounded out in 48 hours or less. Hmn. Correlation...) Going into Clarion West, I was v. apprehensive that I would be unable to maintain a story-per-week pace, but I quite nearly did (I submitted one story unfinished [though some might accuse me of submitting most of my stories unfinished e_e]), and this was actually what convinced me that I might be able to handle NaNoWriMo this year.


Aha. Ahahaha. Dear readers, I have fallen far, far behind. My current word count is as laughable as it is baffling, because in this my third November outside the sacred house of academia, I've had plenty of time to write. Feel free to mock me to my digital face. I just (still) lack the discipline to make a daily ritual of it. Additionally, something else that Clarion West conditioned me to do was write in the sepulchral (what, so I like the word sepulchral) silence of the CW House's Pit of Productivity, wherein one broke said silence under unspoken pain of death, and I have thus far been unable to replicate these conditions out here in the World. 


Aaand typing that out has made me realize that these are all silly excuses and can undoubtedly be remedied by reconditioning, which is something I'll be working on these remaining weeks and beyond. Aja aja fighting!


In unrelated news, Joe has recently gotten into Magic: The Gathering, which is why I just blew another stack of cash that should have probably gone into groceries to buy an event deck.


Remember the note.
The last pre-constructed deck I bought was srsly back in the Masquerade Cycle, which, compounded with the fact that I am able to bitterly recall when X cost a quarter of what it does now, and that I walked uphill through snow both ways the best I could hope for out of my red creatures back then was a bunch of piddling goblins or lightning elementals (today: werewolves wtf), is making me feel my age. I am aware that this confession may well have been the final nail in the coffin of my raging undateability, but so it goes.


But because I am as greedy a planeswalker as I was in my high school years, I find myself once again running into the difficulty of being unable to whittle my red&white deck down to lean, mean, fighting form. After the last of my tearful reductions, my new fighting force is teetering at an unwieldy 95 80 cards.  Internet, please advise me on how to reconstruct my deck and kick the tar out of my n00b boyfriend.




Cheers,