History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

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If you’re an author looking for advice on the internet, you’re likely to come across plenty that’s outdated, possibly “written” by an AI, or otherwise downright bad.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 […]

Gifts for Writers: 2023 Edition

| December 18, 2023

If you’re looking for last minute gift ideas for your favorite writer, check out this list from Cosmo! (No, it’s not Cosmo’s “traditional” fare.) The ideas range all over the place (and come in a variety of price ranges, though there are a lot of higher end items), but I absolutely love the waterproof shower […]

Halfway through The Wayward Writer

| December 11, 2023

Back in January of this year, I decided to start working through the exercises in Ariel Gore’s The Wayward Writer. The book contains 78 exercises, which is enough to fill a year and a half if you do them weekly. Because of planned trips in 2023, I took a handful of weeks off from doing exercises, […]

NaNoWriMo 2023

| December 4, 2023

After not doing NaNoWriMo for several years, I came back to it this year. In large part, this was because Jeremy was going to do NaNo this year, and I joined in solidarity with him. Initially, I set out to write a non-fiction book about how to write a novel. Keeping in mind that I […]

Writer Gift Ideas: The Anti-Planner

| November 27, 2023

Are you or the writer in your life tired of standard planners? Check out The Anti-Planner, which is 1) exactly what it says on the tin and 2) a great boon for neurodiverse people! Instead of expecting you to set up your life in a standard planner, The Anti-Planner is all about getting things done when that’s […]

Thankfulness: Writer’s Groups

| November 20, 2023

As Thanksgiving approaches, thoughts often turn to the things we’re thankful for in the world. For me, I’m thankful for the many, many writer’s communities I’ve found myself a part of over the years I’ve been writing. At first, I was part of a small, in-person, writer’s group, which spanned a good chunk of the […]

WriteHive Panel: Believable Technology in Fiction

| November 13, 2023

One of the panels I watched from the WriteHive online conference was Believable Technology in Fiction. It was a great panel about how to make technology work in your fiction, most often but not always science fiction. The panelists started by talking about technology on the whole, defining it as something that solves a problem […]