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

This has been a strange week for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is deeply ironic. If you recall I wrote a whole blog entry about how I don’t care about having a large audience — instead preferring a smaller, intentional one. In that post I mentioned how I had a decent TikTok following, and how it was probably the least fulfilling part of my online presence.

Don’t get me wrong, I like using TikTok and posting to that platform, and I wouldn’t use it at all if I didn’t. Like, there’s a reason my Instagram is an abandoned mess, and my Facebook pages are largely automated. I just choose not to prioritize the pursuit of an audience there, y’know?

Well, that audience just got me a movie screener.

Like, literally the same day I wrote that post I got an email from a PR company offering me an advanced screener for the upcoming Bryan Fuller directed Dust Bunny. Why did I get this offer? My modest TikTok following, that’s why.

Now, normally I would have ignored that. I’m used to getting review requests I ignore, it’s just usually from some publisher of esoteric books trying to get me to review their author’s work on BS-Free Witchcraft. But, y’see, Crysta apparently had been following the production of this movie for quite a while, and my saying yes let us watch it weeks before it would hit theaters.

So I said yes.

I mean, I was just agreeing to review the movie, so what did I have to lose? I was going to see this thing eventually anyway. So on Saturday we watched it, I recorded my review Sunday night, and on Monday I posted it to TikTok.

Now here’s the thing, I don’t think this video is going to do that well for me. TikTok tends to hate any video I make that isn’t Witchcraft related or related to very specific BookTok drama. The algorithm driven engine behind that site doesn’t show my videos to the audiences that might want to see this review. It’s the whole reason I pitch my Internet Cockroach Theory to begin with. There’s a real chance I never get sent another opportunity like this again because, honestly, I don’t know if anyone’s going to really see this thing.

So, uh, maybe go watch this and share it if you want me to have future chances to see free movies ahead of time. 😆

It’s funny, offers like this never really came when I used to regularly review movies for Nerd & Tie. Now that I’ve seemingly stepped out of pop culture commentary though, stuff just seems to come in on its own. Life is weird, and who knows what’s going to happen next.

I certainly don’t.

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November 17th 1984 is the canonical birthdate of Lynn Guadalupe Baxter, one of the main characters of Full Circle (2006), UnCONventional (2009-2019), and Peregrine Lake (2024-current). That makes today her official 41st birthday.

So, uh, happy birthday to a fake person who mostly just lives in my head I guess?

Out of all the characters I’ve ever written, Lynn is arguably one of the most important ones in my heart. I’ve definitely written more about her than any other character in my life, but that’s just largely due to how long UnCONventional ran. I first came up with her way back in 2003 for a project I never ended up doing called “Re-entry.” I’ve posted the original art I drew of her before when I was coming up with that, but I didn’t end up introducing her to the world until the (now offline) short lived Full Circle interactive fiction project I did with some friends in 2006. That didn’t last that long, but I dug her back up when I was launching UnCONventional in 2009… and she’s managed to stick around ever since.

One of the reasons Lynn is so important to me is that in her creation, I deliberately put into the character a lot of the things I don’t like about myself. I took a lot of my anger, sadness, and worst impulses and put them into her. I think I felt like that if I could make a character with those traits and love her, I could maybe learn to accept them as a part of myself.

What I never expected was for so many other people to love her too.

Now let’s be clear, Lynn is not an author avatar — she’s dealing with a lot of things I’ve never had to. I’ve had support she didn’t, and didn’t ever have to face some of the challenges she has. But in many ways she’s been a means to accept things about myself I sometimes have had a hard time doing so otherwise. She’s important to me in ways none of my other characters are, and it’s been a joy to write her for so long. Lynn Baxter is my favorite fake-person, and to her I guess I say happy fake-birthday.

I look forward to telling more of your story.

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Way back in 2011 I ran probably one of the best known storylines in UnCONventional called “I Hate November.” In the comic, Lynn is pretty much just having a shitty time. We find out some of her backstory, but the focus is much more on her emotional state than any specific events or plot. Its core is a feeling that I don’t know that I’ve ever had the words for, which is why I had to write a whole month long comic to describe it. The phrase “I hate November” was already in my vocabulary long before I wrote the piece.

Because I hate November.

I mean, that’s not fair — I hate how I feel in November. The month itself has never done anything specifically wrong to me. Every year it’s like a cloak of gray kicks in and wraps around me though, one that I have to fight to get out of. Of course, unlike Lynn, this feeling isn’t linked to some deep trauma, it’s for much, much dumber reasons.

It’s because it’s dark out.

I don’t know that I’ve ever really talked about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in the twenty-four years I’ve written this blog, but it’s been happening the whole time. Without fail, it builds up over the fall for me, and then when the clocks change it hits me like a hammer. This has been happening since as long as I can remember, and it just… sucks.

Now, I have stuff I can do to deal with this. Ways to lift myself out of this funk — but they’re tasks I have to actively remember to do. They’re choices that I have to make. They don’t make it go away, but they make it more than manageable. You’d think I’d remember to start doing them every year if this has been my lifelong experience.

I do not.

Literally, every year, I forget. I’m just wandering around going “Why do I suddenly feel like shit all the time?” forgetting this happens every year. It is so predictable, yet I completely forget when the annual “no sun” comes around.

I don’t know that I have anything deeper to say about this right now, but it’s just been on my mind. It’s the sort of thing I historically edited out of this blog after the first few years, but I felt like I needed to write it somewhere.

On the upside, I’ve been writing music again, and digging through old half written pieces to see if there’s anything interesting in there. I might put out a new “album” next year if I feel like it. Right now I’m trying to just make sure I stay on top of the projects I’m already committed to though, so who knows.

I just know that I hate November.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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