History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Fun for Friday: September Writing Prompts!

| August 31, 2018

It’s already September, and I hope that my readers in the Northern Hemisphere are seeing cooler temperatures after the scorcher of a summer than many of us had. I’m sure the parents among you are looking forward to the kids going back to school. This month has some prompts inspired by the back-to-school time, some […]

Unfixed Timelines Stories and Essays

| August 30, 2018

There’s a part of me that still misses academia. When you spend a large chunk of your adult life in an environment, it’s bound to leave some lasting marks on you. I didn’t love teaching, and I wouldn’t have loved the rat race that is tenure, but I liked research and writing and being adjacent […]

Comic Book Round Up: Image and Marvel and More

| August 29, 2018

I’ve been trying to work through my overwhelming stacks of graphic novels, so I’ll be posting brief reviews here, with occasional links to my longer reviews. This week’s selections were primarily Image Comics, with some Marvel Comics and other ones too. Paper Girls Volume 1 (Image Comics) Quick take: Teenage girls in the late 1980s deal […]

Flash Fiction

| August 28, 2018

I was on a panel about flash fiction at SpoCon with several other authors and editors of flash fiction. We differentiated between flash fiction and vignettes, talked about the difficulties of distilling ideas down to something suitable for flash fiction, and the various markets and awards (or lack thereof, in many cases) for flash-length work. […]

What Editors Want

| August 27, 2018

One of the panels I was on at SpoCon was about what editors want. We talked mostly about short fiction acquisition editors, since two of us on the panel were just that, but we also talked about other formats a little bit. The thing that I always come back to when talking about what short […]

Fun for Friday: Sci-Fi Writing Prompts!

| August 24, 2018

I typically have an easy time coming up with fantasy story ideas, but I’m rubbish when it comes to sci-fi story ideas. Luckily, Mandy Wallace has 58 sci-fi writing prompts on her blog. There’s a wide range of ideas here, so you’re sure to find something that sounds good. In the meantime, I’ll definitely be […]

“Happily Never After” in The Colored Lens!

| August 23, 2018

The latest issue of The Colored Lens is out, and with it comes my story, “Happily Never After.” “Happily Never After” is a Cobalt City-adjacent story. It’s actually set in Cerulean City, on the West Coast, but some of the characters in it are from Cobalt City. This is a sort of prequel story for […]

Review of To Another Abyss!

| August 22, 2018

I lived in small college towns from 1992 to 2007–from the time I graduated high school to when I moved to Seattle. And being semi-artistic myself, and having many artistic friends, I was always sort of right on the edge of the art scene of one variety or another. So reading Zach Bartlett’s To Another Abyss! […]

Magical Menagerie

| August 21, 2018

One of the panels I was on at SpoCon was called “The Magical Menagerie,” which I described as the panel on monsters. I introduced myself as an author who loves vampires and also “things that live underwater that want to kill you.” I shared the panel with Dorian Graves and Sanan Kolva. Our conversation was […]

The Pixar Formula

| August 20, 2018

At SpoCon, Frances Pauli and I teamed up to run a writing workshop for teen writers. Frances did most of the work, arriving with some fantastic worksheets that let us put together an easy idea for a story right there! The worksheets were very close to the “Pixar formula”, which runs “Once upon a time […]