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

I know hardly anyone ever reads what I type in this blog, it’s sporadic posts only getting occasionally seen by the folks who follow me on other social platforms clicking through on indistinct links I don’t describe well enough, along with the occasional passersby on my comics who bother to scroll down past what they actually went there for. But I had a strange need to write something tonight — to put down some words in this blog which started when I was twenty-five years younger than I am today.

I sometimes wonder about how stable the world will be in a few years with the chaos we’re currently living through. Is it a good thing we haven’t bought a house yet? Will our savings have any value when all things are said and done? Is the world we live in now the final stages of something that will feel like a distant memory when I’m older?

Assuming I get to be older?

I’ve been watching old archived episodes of The Computer Chronicles, slipping back into time capsules of the 1980s and 1990s through the rose tinted glasses of retro techno-optimism. I don’t miss living in that time period (beyond the general comfort of being a child who didn’t have to remember to check the date on spinach at the grocery store), but I find myself missing the feeling that technology gave me when it frankly just couldn’t do as much.

That probably didn’t make a ton of sense. I don’t really know that I was trying to though.

With the current state of the world, I’ve found myself as stressed out as I did five years ago. And honestly, it’s making writing harder.

Which is, frankly, kind of a problem when you’re knee deep in writing a novel and an ongoing comic. Stuff’s moving, and it’s moving slowly. I may delay the fourth Mia Graves novel a couple of months if I can’t make serious progress in the next two weeks on this draft. Peregrine Lake, thankfully, comes more easily just because I’m not doing that alone and I only have to get the gist of certain things down on the page for Ethan most of the time.

This was a ramble, and a largely pointless one. But it’s the kind of post I used to write here every week for years. I spent a lot of time reworking stuff on this site the last few days, even though almost all of it’s invisible. Like it is no longer unusable on a smart phone now. Because of that I ended up testing and looking at stuff I hadn’t really poked at in a really, really long time.

And I know in a few days I’ll write a new post here about the Shadowcasting eBook becoming available on other platforms beyond Kindle — so this will shuffle off the main page of my site and down the list into the abyss on the comic sites where no one will read this… but I just felt like talking, and you were here to read it.

I should probably take a shower and go to bed. I have a dentist appointment in the morning. I am a responsible person with a regular dentist and doctor.

Couldn’t say that twenty-five years ago.

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I could run through a brief description of the book and I give the back-of-book synopsis again (like I did when pre-orders went up), but you can go back and read that post if you want to. The short version is “how do you talk a twenty-something out of using a magical nuke, especially when you just work retail.”

In all honesty, this is my favorite book in the series so far. In some ways it’s very different than the two earlier books in a couple of ways, but still feels like the same series. There’s not much else I can say without major spoilers, so you’ll just have to trust me on that one.

Like my earlier releases, for the first three months the eBook will be available only on Kindle (and Kindle Unlimited), but you can also get the paperback a couple of ways. First off, there’s always Amazon, but you can always direct order a copy if you want to avoid Bezos. Finally, you can get it through any bookseller with the ISBN 9781088207031.

So yeah, the book is here, and I’m excited that folks will get to read it finally.

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My brother texted the family group chat this quote before he went to work today. I’m not in a good place this morning, but we can’t lose ourselves to despair. I know I have a lot of anger right now, but getting into whose fault what is won’t help anyone.

Dwelling on the people I will never forgive won’t help anyone.

I’m not that optimistic, but hope is a choice we can still make. It’s a hard one to make this morning, but I’m still going to do my best. We are where we are, and focusing on yesterday won’t change that. We can only move forward, and save as many as we can along the way.

There will be a tomorrow because we’re going to make sure there’s a tomorrow.

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