History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Write Hive Conference Videos Available!

| August 21, 2023

A couple of months back, I watched a bunch of the WriteHive conference videos online as a moderator. Now they’re all online and available for anyone to watch here! There are also videos from previous years available at the same location! I’ll be posting some of my thoughts and summaries about many of the individual […]

Interview with CD Covington

| August 14, 2023

Today, I’m talking with CD Covington, who is just about to launch her Kickstarter for A Writer’s Guide to Linguistic Worldbuilding! Keep reading for more on the Kickstarter, CD’s work, and linguistic nerdery! DV: Tell me a little about yourself and your linguistics background. CD: My name is CD Covington, and I’ve been writing as long […]

Stephen Fry on Form, Part 10

| July 31, 2023

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 10, on the sonnet. Why does the sonnet get its own section? Well, there’s a lot of history to unpack, two major forms, […]

Care and Feeding of the Editorial Brain and Body at Flights of Foundry

| July 24, 2023

One of the panels I moderated at Flights of Foundry was called “Care and Feeding of the Editorial Brain and Body”. And while the panelists were editors, and the tips were somewhat geared in that direction, there were also things we talked about that can apply to writers, as well, such as making sure you […]

Writing Tools: The Publishing Goblin’s Oracle Dice

| July 17, 2023

I’ve accumulated a large collection of card-based writing tools, each of which is useful to different parts of my writing process. So I’ve decided to do a series of posts about the various decks I own and how I use them in my writing. This time, it’s a combination of deck and dice in the […]

Resources for Writers at Flights of Foundry

| July 10, 2023

One of the panels I moderated and spoke on at Flights of Foundry was titled Resources for Writers. The other panelists and I talked about how to determine if a resource is of a good quality, and also how to find resources that help vet publishers, presses, etc. We also talked about craft resources, idea […]

Stephen Fry on Form, Part 9

| July 3, 2023

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 9, on “exotic” forms, which really just means “non-Western forms”. The forms in this chapter include the Japanese haiku, senryu, and tanka; the Persian […]

All About Editing at Flights of Foundry

| June 26, 2023

At Flights of Foundry back in April of this year, I attended and spoke on a few panels about editing and freelancing. While I still work a full time job, I have also taken on a lot of freelance editing projects, especially in the past few months. So these panels were helpful to me in […]

Speculative Poetry at Flights of Foundry

| June 12, 2023

I spoke on a couple of panels about poetry at Flights of Foundry, specifically ones on form poetry and the history of speculative poetry, along with teaching a workshop as an introduction to speculative poetry. Form poetry is a huge topic, one I’ve been tackling here with my slow reading of Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less […]

Stephen Fry on Form, Part 8

| June 5, 2023

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 8, on comic forms. This section only covers three forms, and I would argue that the first of them doesn’t have to be […]