Chronicle #001: Fog Over the Week – Dispatches from the Threshold

Date Recorded: 15 May 2025
Filed Under: Author Platform / National Drift / Creative Persistence
Classification: Declassified

“All history is written by survivors—especially the quiet ones.”

It rained all week.

Not just outside, though yes, the skies refused to shut up, but also in the subtle mood that hung over everything. Grey hours, soggy thoughts, and that lingering hum of exhaustion only working adults and aging dogs can truly understand.

The lawn’s gone to hell, but I’ll take the trade if it means diving into fiction again this weekend.

The week started with politics. Or more precisely, posturing. Alberta’s flirtation with fantasy secession reappeared like a bad penny, or worse, a podcast bro with a flag. I posted what needed posting, that you can’t just “yeet” your province out of a country like it’s a Discord server. Especially when you’re standing on land held by Treaty Nations who never ceded that authority to you in the first place.

It landed. Because the truth doesn’t need flair, just clarity.

In between mild outrage and caffeine, I shared something closer to the chest, my writer’s ritual. No daily word counts. No arbitrary sprints. Just structure, coffee, and a canine sidekick who thinks 5:58 AM is the ideal time to start life. I write early, then drop back into the logic-bound world of my day job. One life holds code and automation. The other, story and speculation.

Somewhere in that blurred line between them, I firmed up something new, my epistolary journal. A framework. Titles like Recovered Log or Dispatch to label the days and trace the narrative arc of not just what I write, but who I am while writing.

And this week, I finally launched something I’ve been meaning to for a while: books.by/jason-butterfield a clean, direct storefront where readers can buy my work without algorithmic noise or middlemen. Just the stories. On my terms. It feels small, but meaningful, like planting a flag on my own little literary moon.

So yeah, it rained. The sky was loud. The lawn is a mess. But the signal is clear, I’m still here. Still writing. Still thinking. Still sending out these little transmissions in case someone needs to know they’re not the only one trying to make sense of the world, one line at a time.

—J.B.