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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Tomorrow, April 1st 2025, we have a massively important State Supreme Court election here in the state of Wisconsin. It will decide the balance of the state supreme court, and it’s vitally important that we get Susan Crawford elected. Elon Musk has literally poured millions of dollars into Brad Schimel’s campaign, and we are fighting for our lives here. I’ve already voted, and if you haven’t yet and you live here… make sure you do.

But no matter what happens tomorrow, no matter what the result is, the fight is far from over. ICE agents are grabbing people off the streets, our public institutions are being systematically destroyed, and our international and diplomatic relations with historically close allies are just, honestly, fucked right now. Today is Trans Day of Visibility, and trans and queer rights have been under steady attack by the right. As a nonbinary person and member of the trans community, I’m genuinely scared for a lot of my friends right now.

But we fight. We stand up. We survive.

If we accept defeat, we are handing victory to those who want us dead. By living and fighting, we carry on to the next day and then the day after that. I know I posted it right after the election last November, but there’s a pretty famous Joe Hill quote everyone should keep in mind: “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!”

Go out, hug your friends. Build a local community if you can, and get involved in your local politics. Make sure you call your Reps and Senators every day if you can, and for pete’s sake fucking vote.

We can make it as long as we don’t stop fighting.

Remember that on April 5th at 11AM Eastern/10AM Central you can join me for the Critical Thinking Witches’ Collective’s April Brew virtual event! Attendance is free, and you can register here!

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It’s hard to tell how vulnerable to be on the internet anymore. How safe it it to be so exposed. Twenty years ago I’d just pour anything I was feeling into this space. While I filtered things for other people’s privacy, I never filtered my own feelings.

But I stopped at some point, and this turned into a place where I just promoted my projects and gave generic, general updates. It meant I posted less and less, and I know I’m trying to turn that around. When you make stuff like comics and books and try to talk about them and promote them online, there’s a pressure to be positive constantly. Like when you’re actively trying to provide paths for escapism for people, a lot of people get unhappy when you drag reality into things.

But things are stressful.

Sometimes we’re just holding ourselves together with tape and string, and hoping no one notices. Besides the massively important Wisconsin Supreme Court election on Tuesday (vote Crawford by the way), the outside world isn’t the only pressure. My grandmother is going into hospice, and that brings its own set of stuff. I’ve got a family of people who are all concerned about everyone else’s well being, and not enough people taking care of themselves.

And, like, for the record, I am fine. I will be fine. We have a lot of fighting to do, and I have no intention of giving up. But, like, shit is stressful, y’know? And I think it’s important to acknowledge that stress. I write these things not because I need support, but to acknowledge that they exist. To say “sometimes things are hard and we’re all human.”

Because we are.

And me move forward as best we can.

Remember that on April 5th at 11AM Eastern/10AM Central you can join me for the Critical Thinking Witches’ Collective’s April Brew virtual event! Attendance is free, and you can register here!

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So I’m just going to come out and say it: My favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is “Conundrum.” It’s episode fourteen of season five, and I just deeply love it.

I don’t know if it’s because I literally just assumed Erich Anderson’s Commander McDuff was a random Enterprise officer of the week (which we saw quite often during the show) when I watched it as a kid during the original run, so the twist actually worked on eleven year old me. I don’t know if it’s because I just like a good “everyone has amnesia” story. I don’t even know if it’s just because it’s a good Ro Laren episode. I don’t know if it’s just because we learn that Starfleet doesn’t give a crap about lasers.

I just like it. It’s neat.

And I rewatched it last night, and feel that it holds up — which is why I found it deeply weird that the folks who wrote the episode actually think it’s not that good. My favorite episode of the entire seven season run of the show was a failure according to the folks who wrote it.

And maybe, as a writer and creator, I should remember that.

Like the hardest part of releasing creative works to the public is that often, after a while, I’ll start to judge those things far more harshly than when I first made them. Or I’ll compare it to the potential I thought an idea had in my head. And if I don’t reach that potential, I’ll think of it as “bad” — when it might just be slightly different than that idea. I have one hundred percent published stories that I thought were just sort of okay and later had someone tell me how much it meant to them to read it.

*cough*I Hate November*cough*

So I should make sure I remember Conundrum. That one of my favorite things to rewatch is considered one of those failures by its creators. That the things I make might have value, just not in the way I originally thought they should.

It’s just sort of how things work out.

Remember that on April 5th at 11AM Eastern/10AM Central you can join me for the Critical Thinking Witches’ Collective’s April Brew virtual event! Attendance is free, and you can register here!

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So on April 5th at 11AM Eastern/10AM Central you can join me for the Critical Thinking Witches’ Collective’s April Brew virtual event. You can register for the event here, and it’s completely free.

I’m going to be on a panel that should start about fifteen minutes into the event, hosted by my friend Alex Wrekk (creator of the zine Brainscan and author of Stolen Sharpie Revolution). The other folks on the panel are Lane Smith (author of 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World) and Lee Cotman (author of The Good Enough Pagan Newsletter). We’re going to be talking about book publishing and demystifying the process of getting stuff into print.

I think it’s going to be fun time. I really like CTWC, but haven’t had the chance to do something with them since I was on a panel at CritWitchCon a few years ago. So when Alex asked me if I wanted to do this panel, I said yes as soon as I saw the message.

So yeah, join us and spend a Saturday morning listening to witches talk about books. It should be a good time.

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Nostalgia can hit you hard, and yesterday was certainly felt like a one two punch of it.

First off, I stopped by “Collector Con,” a small con held at the Lismore in downtown Eau Claire. For those of you know my history with conventions, you’d know that when that place was a Ramada it was home to No Brand Con for five years in the late 2000s. I was only there for an hour or so, but it was my first time back in that convention center since I was twenty-nine years old. Like literally the last time I was there was a month before Crysta and I moved to Indiana in 2010.

Which was almost exactly fifteen years ago.

It’s a strange thing to return to a place like that. The room felt smaller than I remembered it, but it’s largely unchanged for better or for worse. It makes me miss running No Brand Con in the space. It never really felt the same after the con moved out of Eau Claire, and even though it felt great that last year in Stevens Point, nothing compares to home sometimes I guess.

Afterwards, I headed over to a friend’s house to hang out with a bunch of old friends from my early twenties. A group of three of my friends (all named David) have been regularly getting together as “The Council of Davids” for dinner for a while, and they’ve started inviting more and more of us to join them. It was a lovely evening talking with old friends (some of whom I haven’t seen in years), a just being social was, frankly, nice.

I have spent the last chunk of my life being a bit of a shut in, and I didn’t use to be. I’m at heart a social being, and I think I need to train myself to have the energy to get out more again. I, believe it or not, am happier when I actually spend time around other humans.

It’s easy to forget when sitting at home is often so much easier.

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So in Wisconsin the April 1st Spring election is in less than two weeks, and it’s a doozy. It’s our first major election since the garbage fire that happened last November, and here in America’s Dairyland we have a massively impactful major race on the ballot: a State Supreme Court seat.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is currently held by the left by a single seat, so the outcome of this race will determine the balance of the court. On the left we have Susan Crawford, and on the right there’s Brad Schimel. While this is, in theory, is a nonpartisan election… let’s not kid ourselves. Nothing ever is anymore, especially when the stakes are as high as this one. It is vital that we elect Susan Crawford.

This court will make many decisions that affect our daily lives. This court is what will decide whether or not Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban is legal or not. This court will either stand up for Wisconsinite’s rights or bow to Trump’s every whim.

And Elon Musk is pouring millions into Schimel’s campaign. Whether this is because he’s doing so for ideological reasons or if it’s just because Tesla is going to have a case in front of the court soon is hard to tell, but either way a billionaire who’s likely barely set foot in the state thinks he gets to decide how we live our lives. He thinks he can buy this election.

But as far as I’m concerned, we’re not for sale.

So I beg you, if you live in Wisconsin make sure you vote. It’s so, so important. Frankly, elections like this have way more impact on people’s lives than they realize. Like also on this ballot is the State Superintendent, and it’s really important that we re-elect Jill Underly. And you probably have things like city council, school board, and other local races on your ballot.

Those local races dictate a lot about what happens in your community, and have a much larger impact on your daily life than you realize. Like the book bans you read about happening in some parts of the country? A lot of that happens at the city government level. Who’s on your local city council or school board is what makes the difference.

We always vote absentee, and I put our ballots in the mail today. I’ll be tracking it over on MyVote to make sure it arrives with our local clerk safely. I can’t emphasize how important this is and how vital it is we all show up on this one.

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So I talked about this on my Tumblr and my TikTok (and cross posted stuff to Bluesky and YouTube), but it would be deeply ironic if I didn’t post something about it here on my actual blog/site. With TikTok likely being banned in the United States in a few weeks, we’re seeing a major social platform go down. A platform where people have built community and connection. A platform people use to get new information, and which has been used to shine a light on current events in ways most people don’t normally get to see.

It may just be gone for users in the US.

And this highlights a major issue with the way people currently use the internet — it’s dependent on centralized platforms. Whether it’s TikTok, Facebook, Bluesky, and even my beloved Tumblr — everyone reserves their interactions what seems like less than a dozen sites/apps. And when everything is based on so few sites, it means that in the best case scenario we surrender control of our speech to those companies’ moderation policies or they can disappear taking down large swaths of our shared culture, content, and ability to communicate.

And that’s why what we direly need right now is to decentralize our internet experiences. You need to build your own shit, and you need to do it now.

This blog that you’re reading (whether its on my main site or one of the comics I write/wrote’s page) is hosted on my own site. I pay every month for some shared server space, and run my own blog software. For most folks, within a few clicks they can get a WordPress installation running on it and build their own online presence.

Now, I know that’s not feasible for everyone, so the other option is just starting a blog on a smaller blogging site. It’s not as good, but it’s better than the current system.

Now, you might be asking yourself, how do I follow people when they’re all posting to separate websites. The answer is simple: the humble RSS feed.

For those unfamiliar, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are effectively a list of updates to a site — sometimes full text, sometimes just summaries. If you listen to podcasts, you actually use these all the time as they’re the backbone of how podcasts operate. All you have to do to follow folks is find a good RSS reader (I use Thunderbird since I already use it as my email client). There are apps for every platform under the sun.

Likewise, we need to start building forums again. We’ve tried starting this with Nerd & Tie [dot] Social ourselves, and modern forum software is easy to set up. If you can’t set one up yourself, but have a friend who can… use it. Build as many small communities as you can across the web.

Because here’s the thing, when there are only a few sites, it’s easy to destroy them. But when there are thousands — maybe even millions — of small communities and sites suddenly you can’t easily remove communities from the web.

Now is discoverability harder in this world? Yes. We’re reliant far more on word of mouth and exchanging links with eachother. But that’s what we exchange for resilience. This is how the old web worked in the 90s and most of the 2000s. We need to rebuild this kind of world, or else we will always be at the mercy and whims of politicians and billionaires.

Which is kind of bad, y’know? Let’s make a world where we all have control of our spaces, where we can spread to every nook and corner of the web.

Let’s be cockroaches.

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So Shadowcasting, the third book in the Mia Graves Saga, came out back in December in paperback and on Kindle. Well, its been three months, and that means its time for the eBook to get wider availability!

Shadowcasting is now available in my Patreon shop! It’s the same price as the book is on Amazon ($3). Like previous books I’ve released in my Patreon shop, patrons at the $10 level can download the book as a part of their benefits. Additionally, this will become available to folks at the $5 level on December 15th 2025.

Over the next few days the book will also become available on Kobo (it’s currently awaiting approval). Additionally it will become available on Overdrive for Libraries to purchase as an eBook.

I’ve said this before, but Shadowcasting is probably my favorite book in the series so far, and I’m excited that it will be available on more platforms for people to enjoy. Of course, you can still buy the book as a paperback on Amazon, as a direct order through IngramSpark, or through any bookseller with the ISBN 9781088207031. Or, y’know, on Kindle too I guess.

And, as always, the earlier two books in the series, The Witch and the Rose and Bloody Damn Rite are still on sale too both on my Patreon shop, Amazon and everywhere else.

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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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