History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening To, September 2020 edition

| September 16, 2020

Reading: I’m finally caught up on reading for reviews, which means I get to read Harrow the Ninth. All of my friends have been reading it and getting through it and making references I don’t understand, so I’m chugging through! Watching: We blew through the first half of Lucifer season 5, and we’ve wrapped up what […]

Out Today: Unfixed Timelines 2!

| September 15, 2020

Unfixed Timelines 2 is out today, with six short stories, one poem, and seven essays about the real history that inspired each of the stories! This volume of stories includes: “Nochnaya Serenada” (reprint) and an essay about the history of the Night Witches “Have You Seen Him?” and an essay about the historical connections between […]

Writing Down Story Ideas

| September 14, 2020

I’ve got notes in a variety of places that are meant to be story ideas, but not all of them seem to work as such. This article has an explanation of why that might be, and advice on what you can do to make your written down story idea notes work even if they sit […]

Fun for Friday: Possibly Linked Images?

| September 11, 2020

This week, I’ve got three photos that I can see an easy link between. But you might come up with a different way of looking at them! The first photo is whitecaps on a bit of ocean. The second photo is a person who is out of focus climbing a natural rock wall along a […]

Supporting my Patreon!

| September 10, 2020

Did you know that I have a Patreon? I do! It’s a way for my fans to throw a small amount of money my way to support my writing and learn about what I’m working on! I haven’t reached my first goal, which involves a monthly video of me reading one of my stories or […]

Awesome Find: World Roulette

| September 9, 2020

I LOVE things that allow for random idea generation, so I’m super excited about World Roulette. It’s part art book and part advice on world building. But there’s also a deck of world building cards with instructions on how to make infinite combinations with those cards. And one can never have too many sets of […]

Things in the Water that Will Kill You

| September 8, 2020

When asked to summarize what I write, I often tell people “I write about things in the water that will kill you.” And while not all of my stories share that distinction, I have more stories about murderous aquatic creatures than nearly any other topic. I’ve written about vodyanoi, nixes, the stromkarl, selkies, and, of […]

When the Story is Too Big

| September 7, 2020

We recently watched Bill and Ted Face the Music, as Jeremy and I are both huge fans of the original Bill and Ted movies. And while we enjoyed the most recent entry into this franchise, we both agreed that it paled in comparison to the previous movies. The biggest problem that we identified was that […]

Fun for Friday: Story Starters for Kids

| September 4, 2020

If you’ve got kids in your life who are aspiring authors, but they don’t always have the ideas that go with that aspiration, or if you’d like to encourage kids to try their hand at writing fiction, check out this story starter generator from Scholastic! Specifically geared toward kids, and with three genres and a […]

August 2020 Recap

| September 3, 2020

By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 114 Acceptances received: 1 Rejections received: 46 Stories withdrawn: 0 Resubmissions: 28 New Submissions: 29 Stories out at the end of the month: 123 This month was a little slow on the resubmissions front, but I submitted a ton of new poetry and a […]