Peregrine Lake – A Weekly Webcomic Written by Trae Dorn and Drawn by Ethan Flanagan

On December 8th 2009 the first strip of UnCONventional went online. UnCONventional wasn’t the first webcomic I ever attempted (the first was “Room 825” which ran for a few months back in the year 2000), but it’s the first one that stuck round. The comic ran for almost exactly ten years, with the final strip going up December 5th 2019.

I’ve included the first and last comics here for comparison.

UnCONventional is the first time I really focused down on what I needed to write and finish a story. Updating that every week helped me find the discipline to really chart out arcs, understand my limitations, and how to use those limitations to my advantage. It’s such an inside-baseball comic, where I know it’s not really accessible to folks who are outside of the convention scene, but it’s the reason why the more broadly appealing stuff I do works at all.

I learned all of those lessons while writing that weird, incredibly niche comic.

These days I’m writing novels, a new comic, and GMing actual play shows — but my ability to tell a story over a long term arc was honed and perfected in that silly little semi-autobiographical comic about nerds running a convention in a college town. It’s nice to remember what it was. Even when it was bad, it made me better at what I’m doing now.

And I think that’s neat.

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