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

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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One of the most frustrating things over the last few months has been dealing with my website getting constantly hit with requests from malicious bots repeatedly hammering and scraping my website. Back at the beginning of August I described it as a DDOS attack — where bots were hammering the old TRHOnline Forums. It took down the Perl interpreter on the server, was burning through my bandwidth, and effectively crashed my whole website.

I ended up band-aiding some stuff (and taking the forum offline), but in September I effectively had to recode my whole website in PHP to keep the thing online.

The bots, which ignore the robots.txt file on my server (or are deliberately targeting things listed on it), have been largely running from cloud service providers. They disguise their useragents as normal people, but it’s easy to backtrack their IPs (and they don’t request a website the same way a human end-user does). I stopped it for a while by blocking any requests from Google’s cloud services back in September, but they restarted this month running off of Alibaba and Tencent’s.

It’s like playing wack-a-mole.

Like I don’t know if this is for illicit AI scraping or if it’s an attempt to find an exploit in old PHPBB code (they keep trying to get to the version of the forum I took down — which now redirects them to a Rick Roll). I mean, maybe I really am the victim of a DDOS attack, though I find that highly unlikely.

It’s mostly just annoying, because there are a million things I’d rather be doing than this like talking about my upcoming novel or the great episode of BS-Free Witchcraft coming out Saturday with Thumper Forge. But no, instead I’m searching out IP blocks I can ban from my site to keep it running, hoping I don’t accidentally kick some legitimate visitors.

It’s just annoying and I hate it.

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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