Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 17/08/2026I hope someone enjoyed the Grebe or Water Rail their phone mistook for the pigletty sound of my wet crocs on grass this morning. #dogsofbluesky #birding #Scotland 060
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 16/08/2026"You must throw the stick. ...You may not touch the stick. You must throw the stick." -Echo #dogsofbluesky #labrador #Scotland 070
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 14/08/20261972 Norwegian Arctic. Strøm mushes his dog pack, the past mushes him, while something colder and darker than the polar night waits out on the ice. thesearedogyears.dog/anomaly.html #shortstory #booksky #horror #dogsofbluesky 040
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 22/07/2026I hurdled, she limboed. We shared the wild raspberries on the other side. #DogsOfBluesky #Nature #Scotland 070
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 19/07/2026thirty miles of good clean air between our hill and someone else's mountain tonight 010
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 19/03/2026Scottish winters can be relentless. Stormy, cold, wet and dark. If you like the outdoors and you work and commute, you can end up living for the weekend. Hoping for dry weather on your day off. Then the day arrives when you realise the 9-5 has left you enough light, and the world is wide again. 2170
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 10/03/2026The stories page was a list. Functional and... fine. The problem: each story lives in a completely different time and place. A list flattens that. So I rebuilt it as a carousel: one story, one image, one world at a time. thesearedogyears.dog #webdev #booksky #amwriting #indieweb 050
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 09/03/2026Dogs have been everywhere that humans have, but didn't try to narrate it or give their hot take. They just caught the scent of joy, heard mischief on the hill a mile off, felt danger coming along their spine. That makes them the perfect comrades for adventure. Here's Echo this weekend. 293
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 07/03/2026wing's tip carves the sky mastery needs no witness the buzzard just is 100
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 06/03/2026Planning a euro trip on the ferry early June. Belgium, Netherlands, Le Touquet. Echo has opinions (pro cheese mostly), but limited geographical knowledge. What's unmissable with a dog? Anywhere we shouldn't bother with? #DogsOfBluesky #Belgium #Netherlands #France #travel 051
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 05/03/2026We had a contextless yellow van with 'potatoes' stenciled on the side driving round my neighbourhood in the 80s. No phone number, no name, just the assumption you'd what- flag him down to access the potatoes? Also this: 000
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 04/03/2026My brain's writing a novella set in a corporate climate refuge in 2038 when I only asked it for a short story. Your dog's violated the terms of employment/residence/existence and the clock's ticking. I think it shares DNA with Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but nobody gets the luxury of going mad. #WIP 110
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 03/03/2026Honestly I wasn't setting substack alight. But since leaving and building a wee site of my own (with no idea how), I found the fringe benefit of not having to pick your aesthetic from a limited menu. The page itself becomes part of the story, not just a container for it. #indieweb #booksky 151
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 02/03/2026'Why Dogs?' #3 Writing stories across different times and places needs witnesses. Dogs are perfect for that. Here's Echo from the Fife coast this weekend, fresh from everyone's business. #DogsOfBluesky #booksky #amwriting 1110
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 24/02/2026I grew up on spoken word vinyl discs like HCA's Snow Queen, with voice acting, snowstorms, hoofbeats etc. That's why I'm risking hokeyness to put optional ambient sounds with the Dog Years stories. Nobody has to use them. But if they do, I hope they feel like bedtime stories for grown-ups. #indieweb 020
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 23/02/2026Dogs arrived before we had a fixed home to offer them. Before we had reliable food to share. In many ways before we'd done becoming recognisably human. They were just there, and up for it. Whatever we both are, we became it together. So umm, yeah, that's why dogs. Wait where'd you go? #dogsofbluesky 041
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 19/02/2026Haha thanks 😄 Yeah, exactly- when you list the 'standard dog attributes' you basically get a recipe for coolness: live in the moment, enjoy your people, show love freely, hold few grudges, embrace dumb joy. Conclusion: cool guys, worth writing about forever. Thanks for the repost too! 120
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 18/02/2026Working on a story with a marriage ending- it's all terse words in the dog park at handover time. The question: how do you make it compelling/fun, and not just mean/sad? Hepburn and O'Toole have the masterclass. Goldman's words. Merciless wit. Irresistible, consummate cruelty. #WritingCommunity 160
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 17/02/2026"I went from zero website to one website in four months and it hasn't made me a penny." ...is exactly why I don't have a productivity substack going gangbusters BUT I made a cute retro little online home for my stories AND learned a bit about coding which turns out to be kinda creative. #IndieWeb 041
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 16/02/2026"Why dogs?" #1 We teamed up so long ago that we're like friends who've been close since kindergarten. There's no imagining either one without the other. We're a Gordian knot at this point. Anyway here's a pic of Echo from the weekend. #dogs #dogsofbluesky #writing #literaryfiction #history 1491
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 10/02/2026-Smaller -Slower -Weirder -Kinder That's how my stories get to be when they're relaxing in their own space, and that's why I've been learning basic code stuff and building a website for them. Someone said it feels like circa 2002 internet and I'm absolutely chuffed with that. 010
Ian C Peake @thesearedogyears.dog · 09/02/2026I've been writing a collection called Dog Years. They're stories about humans and dogs across tens of thousands of years. Why? Dunno. But I'm having fun, and dogs are cool (and many other things too). Nine stories so far. More coming. They live free on my website www.thesearedogyears.dog 27527