History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Have You Left a Book Review Lately?

| March 18, 2024

If you’re a reader (and if you’re not, I’m a little confused about what brought you to my website) or writer, have you left a book review for someone lately? Even if your review is short and sweet (“Loved it!” and “Great read!” are both good options), it helps writers out immensely when people review […]

Ideas for Genre Mashups

| March 11, 2024

On Friday, the writing prompts were related to genre mashups, and today, I’m sharing an article from one of the Story Engine folks on how you can use the Story Engine cards to create mashed-up genre story plots. The Story Engine cards are among my favorite card-based writing tools, so it’s neat to see these […]

Advice on Writing Fairy Tale Retellings

| March 4, 2024

I’ve been noodling on a fairy tale retelling recently, and I came across this article that gives some good advice on writing such a thing! The one I’m working on may add some additional levels of complexity to this advice, but it’s definitely a good starting point!  

Writing Tool: Freeform (iOS)

| February 26, 2024

Not too long ago, an author friend of mine mentioned using Freeform, an iOS app, to organize his thoughts on a story he was working on. He added photos of his cast, notes on each of them, and a day by day outline for each of the major characters, along with what happened for each […]

Bogging Down in Revisions

| February 19, 2024

I’m currently in the midst of revising a novella, and I’ve definitely hit the mucky middle. I didn’t feel like it slowed down substantially when I was writing this part of the book, but now I’m second-guessing everything I’ve written, all the parts I’ve revised, and all the parts I haven’t revised. It’s sort of […]

Writing What You Love

| February 12, 2024

A lot of writing advice tells authors to write what you know, but I think it’s more important to write what you love. Chuck Wendig agrees. In his blog post, he talks about writing marketable stuff when the market is fickle, and so much more. So why not just write what you love?  

Revitalizing a Story from the Discard Folder

| February 5, 2024

Sometimes, I go digging in my old story discard folder and strike gold! Over the years I’ve been writing, I’ve sometimes set fragmentary stories aside. In many cases, I know what I want to do with the stories, but I just haven’t had time to finish them. For others, I’m still struggling with what I want […]

Weird Writing Advice?

| January 29, 2024

If you’re looking for a source of weird writing advice, may I point you toward Kurt Pankau’s blog? His theme for 2024 is weird writing advice, which he’s calling Your Mileage May Vary. That second link will take you to all of his posts on the topic to date, which means if you’re finding this […]

Anti-Advice: Bad Writing Advice

| January 22, 2024

If you’re an author looking for advice on the internet, you’re likely to come across plenty that’s outdated, possibly “written” by an AI, or otherwise downright bad. This article from LitHub collects some samples of bad advice, often given by good writers. This is the sort of stuff that gets repeated over and over again […]

Evolution of My Planner Books

| January 15, 2024

It’s interesting to look back at the evolution of the way I’ve used planner books throughout my writing career. I have posts from 2019, 2020, and January and August 2021. These trace my shift from using post-it notes on a two-page spread for each week to ditching the post-it notes and shifting to a page […]