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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Right now I’m sitting in my favorite chair in my living room, safely home after having spent Thanksgiving with most of my family in Milwaukee. Normally I’d still be there, and wouldn’t have come home until tomorrow night — but the forecast has a massive winter storm coming through tonight through tomorrow afternoon.

So, being a rational human being who doesn’t want to drive through six to ten inches of snow, Crysta and I cut our visit short and drove home today.

It was still a good visit. Thanksgiving was at my parent’s house, and altogether there were thirteen of us for dinner. Then, earlier today I guess since it’s still before midnight, I helped my dad put up the outdoor Christmas lights (which I’ve been doing with him the day after Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember). I would have taken a photo, except as a rule I don’t take photographs of the exteriors of loved ones’ homes and post them online because I don’t want to accidentally dox them.

It’s far too easy to figure that stuff out if you know what you’re doing.

Afterwards my brother came over to watch the Bears game, and when it wrapped up? Crysta and I hit the road and drove home. It’s weird to be home this early on Thanksgiving weekend, but, again, the roads are going to be terrible tomorrow, while tonight they were clear and safe.

I don’t know if there was much of a point to this entry besides just updating y’all on my mundane life. But, like, it’s a good mundane life. I think that it’s important to remember the simple joys of spending time with the people you love, and it’s nice to have a highlight to pull me out of the darkness this time of year.

So that’s what happened.

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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As a person who makes creative projects and publishes them on the internet, there’s a push to find the largest audience possible. Modern social media focuses on follower count and reaching as many folks as possible, but the more I think about it — the more I see this kind of pursuit as unfulfilling. This isn’t a criticism of people who want that audience, and I definitely wouldn’t say no to it if it showed up at my doorstep, but these days I find myself wanting to focus on something else: developing a smaller, more intimate community.

I’ve eluded to it in some of my TikTok posts, but I honestly think at this point in my existence of “person who makes shit and puts it online” I get much more satisfaction communicating with a handful of folks who really like what I’m doing. Like UnCONventional never had more than, like, four hundred regular readers, but that audience actively engaged with what I was making. They fought in the comments over character motivations, and genuinely cared about the outcome. BS-Free Witchcraft has a regular listenership of a few thousand, but I love the feedback I get from the small group that gathers on the Nerd & Tie Discord.

In theory, with almost twenty-three thousand followers on my TikTok, I have the potential to reach so many more people there than I do anywhere else, and it’s not that large a following in the grand scheme of the social web. But reaching that audience seems less fulfilling than the three digit numbers currently reading Peregrine Lake.

Intentional small audiences with a sense of community feel much more connected, and I think that’s probably the more emotionally healthy pursuit for me right now. It’s definitely a more sustainable one, and one hundred percent a more achievable one… because I have achieved it. But the thing is, these communities are two way streets. Like there are tons of people making stuff and putting it out to small communities like mine, and the only reason they’re sustainable is that the audience interacts back.

If you’re reading fics on AO3, leave a comment. If you like the YouTube video of a small creator, tell them how much you appreciated it. If you’re reading a comic, let the creator know how much you’re enjoying it. Every single person who makes stuff wants to know you’re out there, and that interaction is what makes making stuff feel worth it. Participate — because that’s how you build community.

I don’t know if there was really a point to this past my climbing up my own asshole about the nature of internet fame and audiences, but I kind of had the need to write it anyways. Who knows why the hell I do anything.

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