My grandmother died last night. This wasn’t a shock or a surprise. Her health has been on the decline, and she’s been in hospice for the last month. She lived a long life, and in her final days she was surrounded by her three adult children.

My grandma was a kind woman. She wasn’t perfect, but I always felt loved in her presence. She was a retired kindergarten teacher, and was still working when I was a kid. I have so many happy memories sitting at her kitchen table, and I’m going to carry those with me for the rest of my life. She was also proof that anyone who claims that you get more conservative as you get older is full of shit, because she certainly didn’t.

I think it’s interesting how the body processes grief sometimes. I don’t know that I’ll cry, but over the past month, knowing this was coming, I’ve felt a tension in my gut. Now that she’s passed, instead of relief that tension is replaced by a sense of emptiness. That something is missing that should still be there. Something has been taken away, and I feel it.

Of course, as I wrote that, I immediately started crying… so I guess my body processes grief in pretty ordinary ways too.

I wanted to come up with something profound linking this to Beltane, which we sit in the middle of right now, but it just seemed hackneyed. Like I was trying to dig out some greater significance when the truth is death comes whenever it wants. The only predictable thing about it is that it’s the end of all of our journeys. I hope that when I pass I’m so lucky to have lived such a long life with people that I love around me in my final days.

For the record, I will be fine. I just needed to get these words out while they were still in my head. I don’t have some rousing conclusion or deep insight to tack on here at the end, just that gut feeling that something is missing.

Because it is.

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On Monday night a storm rolled through town. It only took a half an hour for the rain and wind to hit and leave, but in that time a tornado passed by about fifteen miles south of where I live. It was one of four that hit Eau Claire county during that storm, but thankfully those tornados hit mostly unoccupied farmland.

While there was property damage, no one got hurt.

Besides a period of time where Crysta and I awkwardly stood by our bathroom so we could avoid windows, we were largely unaffected by the entire thing. It almost felt like a metaphor though for everything that’s happening in our lives right now. Bursts of chaos that we know will pass, but we can’t ignore them while they happen.

I don’t want to make it sound like everything is doom and gloom. There are definitely some bad things happening (like my nonagenarian grandmother being in hospice, and y’know, *gestures at the American government*), but I still find joy in what I’m doing. There was a rainbow after the storm passed, and the metaphoric rainbows are happening too.

I don’t know, when things get like this I get a bit fried. I’ve got so much writing to do right now and I’m weeks behind where I want to be right now on both Peregrine Lake scripts and the novel I’m working on. We’ll be going up to our annual week at the cabin soon, and I’m hoping to get some stuff words down then. It’s just hard to get work done when your brain is lit up like a Christmas tree.

On the upside, I’m super happy with how this month’s episode of BS-Free Witchcraft turned out. It was supposed to be a quick and dirty episode on the Pagan Invasion, a 90s piece of Evangelical Christian satanic panic era propaganda, but I ended up researching way deeper than I intended. I’m really happy with the way it turned out, and it’s one of the few episodes where I think the video version is genuinely a better experience than the audio only version.

I don’t know. We’re getting things done and moving forward. All storms eventually pass, and we will find the sunlight and pick up the wreckage afterwards. Find the rainbows where you can, and let’s keep moving.

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Even though I just got home, it’s time to hit the road again — as on Saturday (April 26th 2025) I’m going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI.

Concinnity is a one day con held at MSOE downtown. This is the con’s 25th year, and even though I’ve been doing Wisconsin cons since, well, before this con existed, somehow I’ve never ended up going to it until now. Largely this is because it fell so close to No Brand Con historically, so I was usually far too burnt out to do another event so close to it. But as No Brand is on hiatus, I figured it was about time I dipped my toe in and sent off a vendor application a while back.

I’m excited to finally go to this. I’ll have all my standard stuff for sale, so if you’re in town and feel like going to a little college show, stop on by and say hello. After this con though I’m going to take a well deserved rest. This much travel can take a lot out of me — we’ve only been home for a couple of days, and we’re immediately hitting the road again with this con.

In fact I should probably go to bed right now.

My next cons after this won’t be until this summer, with Big Minneapolis Anime in Minneapolis August 2-3, and then Anime 414 in Milwaukee August 9-10. The former of which I’ll be sharing a table with Peregrine Lake artist Ethan Flanagan. I’m slowly building up to a full schedule again this year, and I’m trying new stuff as much as I can.

Hopefully y’all come with me for the ride.

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So I just got home from traveling out to Maryland to visit my sister and her family for the Easter weekend. We got in the truck and drove the almost exactly one thousand miles to her home in Rockville, MD. It’s the second time we’ve done this, and we genuinely spend twice as much time traveling as we do actually spending time with family.

I genuinely love a good road trip, and the journey, which crosses through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, is deeply satisfying. Almost exactly in the middle, of course, is Pokagon State Park in Indiana.

Searching through my blog, somehow I’ve never mentioned Pokagon by name here, though it has come up. We first went there almost ten years ago for our fifth wedding anniversary, and we fell in love with the place. Indiana has a historic inn system in its state parks, and Pokagon sits on a beautiful lake. I know Crysta doesn’t enjoy the traveling as much as I do, so I think visiting Pokagon is the only reason she hasn’t demanded we switch to flying out to Maryland when we make the trip.

I love the journey though, I really do. And I love seeing my family so much. It’s easy to feel isolated from them when we’re often so far away. It’s been an amazing six days. Besides my sister, her husband, and my two niblings, my parents, my brother and his long time girlfriend were also there. We won’t be together again until this summer, and that won’t come fast enough.

That said, it feels so amazing to be sitting in my own chair in my own home again right now. One of the best parts of a long trip like this is feeling yourself relax when your travels are over. Of course, we don’t get to relax for long with a con this weekend — but I’m going to take it where I can get it.

The world never stops.

This Saturday, April 26th, I’m going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI! Stop on by and say hi if you’re in town!

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One year ago, on April 16th 2024, the first page of Peregrine Lake went online. One year since we first met Bev as she drove through a snow storm and said the exact thing most of us have said in that scenario.

It took so long for Peregrine Lake to get off the ground. I first announced it back in December of 2019, and originally I was going to draw it. And then the world fell apart, and I found myself with zero ability to draw it anymore. I kept kicking the idea around, wanting to move it forward when in 2023 I jokingly suggested to my friend Ethan that they could draw the comic for me.

And they said yes, they’d love to, and I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

We then spent almost a year regularly meeting, talking about my plans for the plots, the world, the characters, and all the things that would have otherwise just lived in my head. I started scripting comics, and Ethan got to work on concept art. And for most of 2023 we planned and got ready, and we hit the ground running in 2024.

And now we’re here. Honestly, I love everything we’ve put out over the last year. Ethan’s art is incredible, and tells the story in a way that I’m not sure mine would have. I love this comic, I love that you all are reading it, and I’m excited to show you what’s coming next.

Because we’ve only just scratched the surface on how weird this is going to get.

On April 26th I’m going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI! Stop on by and say hi if you’re in town!

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Fandom is something we all get into because we, frankly, like something. I feel like that shouldn’t be something that I have to spell out, but every once and a while I find myself in a fandom space where that doesn’t seem apparent to someone.

I reblogged a post on Tumblr a couple of days ago which to explain fully to people who have never been in fandom spaces would take a lengthy explanation of “shipping” across multiple decades. But the cliffs notes version is that people who call themselves “antis” like to morally police the way people romantically pair fictional people.

In that reblog, the first poster (who is literally a teenager it turns out) puts together some bad faith suppositions about “proshippers,” and someone responds explaining how wrong they are. And I don’t want to discuss how self described “antis” weaponize accusations of pedophilia in these conversations, and we all agree that actual predators don’t belong in fandom spaces.

What I want to talk about is what I started with: fandom is supposed to be fun.

If people are engaging with a work in a way you don’t like? You don’t have to talk to them. If someone’s writing a fanfic that literally disgusts you? Don’t read it. If you don’t like a thing? Don’t engage with it. None of this is that difficult.

Like there was a lot of weird discourse in the Voltron fandom when the Netflix series was airing. Or at least that’s what I’m told. I honestly didn’t experience any of it — because while I loved the show and happily talked to friends about it, I didn’t engage with the folks who were making it weird. And guess what? I had a perfectly good time, and if the folks doing the stuff I didn’t like had a bad time it wasn’t because of me.

I know that tribalism has always been here — but “arguments” should be recreational. Like I enjoy arguing that Jason Todd should have stayed dead, and my friend Becca hates the new Star Wars canon — but conversations about this stuff are for fun.

If you’re spending all your time policing what other people are doing (that otherwise hurts no one) instead of doing the things you actually like… you’re not actually engaging in fandom, you’re just being a dick. And, like, I don’t think it should be controversial to say you shouldn’t be one.

Like the stuff you like, don’t engage with folks who like stuff you don’t like, and maybe mind your business sometimes. This is supposed to be fun, stop doing stuff that makes it not.

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So Meta/Facebook apparently used millions of books to train its AI model without the permission of the authors or publishers. These aren’t even books they purchased, but books they illegally downloaded. I’ve known about this for a few weeks (and apparently the story first broke back in January), but The Atlantic has a tool to see if a book has been stolen.

And lo and behold The Witch and the Rose is in there.

It’s honestly frustrating how a major company like this can just blatantly violate copyright law. It’s not only copyrighted content, but stolen copyrighted content. We spent the last several decades with major companies going after people for piracy, and a company run by a billionaire can just casually get away with it. And from all reports, this is something Zuckerberg himself authorized.

I am, frankly, deeply frustrated.

Look, I have a nuanced opinion on generative AI. I think there are good applications when its created using ethically sourced training data — but the fact is literally none of the commercial products out there right now are. People keep trying to use it for everything, and companies keep shoehorning it into every product. But, like, you should not be using ChatGPT to get “answers” to questions because generative AI doesn’t actually understand what its saying. Large language models are literally fancy autocomplete, and it can “hallucinate” some wild stuff. You cannot trust anything it produces.

I hate that it’s called “AI,” because it leads folks to think something deeper is happening behind the scenes. But its not. Image generation is more interesting on a technical level, but again — none of the image generators available right now are trained on ethically sourced data.

Frankly, generative AI in all of its forms is trained on other people’s work, so (what we’re pretending is) AI can never truly produce a real work of creativity. It’s all derivative schlock. And if we lived in a world where it was built honestly and ethically, it could be useful for things like rapid prototyping and brainstorming.

But we don’t live in that world.

So don’t use it.

And fuck Meta, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg for stealing my book.

On April 26th I’m going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI! Stop on by and say hi if you’re in town!

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I love living in Wisconsin. I really do. I love living just south of the 29 divide between “up north” and the rest of the state. I love living in a smaller city too — all the advantages of civilization, but I can get myself either into the woods or into the countryside within five to ten minutes depending on the direction I pick.

But I do hate one thing: the fucking deer.

That’s right, this is a blog post where I complain about deer. There is no metaphor here or deeper meaning. Anyone who has talked to me for an extended period of time about the damned animals won’t be surprised by anything I say here, and this isn’t code for anything else. This is literally just about deer.

I don’t think people who live in places without deer understand how fundamentally annoying they are to live around. And, y’know, it’s my own fault — I chose to live where the deer are. It is very much on me that I have this problem. But it’s still a problem.

Yesterday morning, on the way home from the grocery store, on the most suburban looking street you’ve ever seen, I had to slam on brakes because a deer ran out into the street. Off to the side of the road were at least five more, sitting there… waiting. And this was not the first time this has happened. Heck, it’s not the first time it’s happened in the last few weeks. It’s at least the fifth or sixth.

And I know they’re more active around dawn and dusk, and that I go to the store right around sunrise right now, but it’s still deeply annoying.

When the weather is nice, I like to take walks. Heck, when my knees like me I even go on runs. One day a few years ago, running through the local park, a deer ran out in front of me and I almost barreled right into it. I barely avoided hitting a deer on foot. Deer are incredibly dumb and skittish.

They’re like rabbits who can wreck your car.

It’s always amusing to me when I talk to people who don’t live around deer who always get excited or in awe when they see them up north. I used to feel like that when I was younger and hadn’t spent years annoyed with them. Now when I see a deer I just roll my eyes and pray they don’t decide to run into me.

There wasn’t really a point to this beyond expressing my annoyance with the white tailed wildlife denizens of the local woods. I mostly just wanted to complain about them, so I did. Was it a waste of time? Maybe.

But I do feel better about it now either way.

On April 26th I’m going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI! Stop on by and say hi if you’re in town!

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The weather has been on a roller coaster lately, just like it ends up every spring here in Wisconsin. For the last several weeks the temperatures have gotten nice and warm on Friday only to plunge back into the cold on Saturday. This week, with temperatures in the fifties, we’re finally having a nice Sunday. Spring never arrives all at once. It turns up for moments and then retreats.

Frankly, I think it’s just determined to mess with me.

I had a lovely time yesterday participating in the Critical Thinking Witch Collective‘s April Brew. I haven’t done anything with them since CritWitchCon 2022, and I’m so glad they asked me to join in for this event. They’ve asked if I wanted to do stuff a few other times, but I can get myself a bit overwhelmed in the fall when CritWitchCon comes around, so this was actually super nice. It helps that the topic was one I felt comfortable dropping in on without feeling like I needed to shore up my sources.

Because I’m neurotic like that and even if I know a topic backwards and forwards I’m not comfortable speaking on most of them in public without preparing five pages of notes. The secret to the podcast is that I can have my sources up on screen just next to my camera, so if I ever have any doubts, I can just see the original data. It’s hard to do that in an impromptu panel where the subject can go off in a different direction at any given moment.

Anyways, my particular flavor of crazy aside, it’s gorgeous out right now, so Crysta and I are thinking about taking a lovely drive in the country. It should be nice — the sun is shining, the weather’s lovely, and we have a full tank of gas. We used to take drives like this all the time, but have fallen out of the habit.

I think it will be lovely.

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So I’m finally in a good mood with yesterday’s electoral wins, so I thought I’d post about some fun stuff instead of how the world is on fire for once. As some of you know, I’ve been trying to slowly ease myself back into doing cons, and last year I did three. This year, as you recall, I already did Evercon last month, but that’s just the beginning of my calendar.

I have four more shows that are booked and locked for 2025 so far, with the likelihood of a fifth. So that means in total I will be doing about twice the number of cons in 2025 than I did in 2024. We’re effectively getting back to my pre-COVID schedule, even if the shows I’m booking are sometimes very different. It’s nice to get out there again though, to engage with folks, and to be a part of the community again.

Before we get to in person events, I want to remind folks that this Saturday morning, April 5th, I’m doing a virtual event with the Critical Thinking Witches’ Collective. For their April Brew, which starts at 11am Eastern/10am Central, I’ll be on a panel that should start about a half hour in with a few other folks where we’re going to talk about book publishing. You can register for free if you want to attend! It should be really fun.

Anyways, here’s my current schedule for the rest of the year (so far):

• Apr 26 Concinnity
  Milwaukee, WI MSOE – Diercks Hall
   
• Aug 2-3 Big Minneapolis Anime (Tabling w/ Ethan Flanagan)
  Minneapolis, MN Minneapolis Convention Center
   
• Aug 9-10 Anime 414
  Milwaukee, WI Baird Center
   
• Sep 13 Eau Claire Comic Con
  Eau Claire, WI Eau Claire Expo Center

I’m really excited for this schedule (and, again, I’m looking to add to it). Is it exactly what I wish I was doing? No – but it’s still pretty good so I’m definitely not complaining.

2020 was supposed to be my year of conventions, but obviously the world fell apart (and a lot of those shows didn’t survive). Ironically at the time I was looking to shift to promoting Nerd & Tie over just my own stuff (as UnCONventional had just wrapped), but I’ve since written multiple novels so I’ve been slipping back to myself. Ideally we’d be doing Nerd & Tie tables too, and I’m hoping to expand to that… but for now? It’s nice to find my footing again.

Wow it’s nice to feel occasionally hopeful.

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