History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Fun for Friday: Sepia-Tone Photo Prompt

| September 7, 2018

For today’s Fun for Friday, I thought I’d go with an old photo–this one is from 1895, and features a seated man and a standing woman, both dressed in the fashions of that time. The woman appears to have a book in her hand … wonder what it’s about? While this couple most clearly fits […]

Fun for Friday: Sci-Fi Photo Prompt

| August 10, 2018

This image (deleted) is just so chock full of promise, I don’t even know where to begin! There’s the gorgeous sci-fi city in the background, of course, but the girl in the foreground is what draws my attention. Is she a robot? Is she a cybernetically enhanced human? I think it could go either way, […]

Fun for Friday: August Writing Prompts

| July 27, 2018

August is just around the corner, so it’s time for the August writing prompts! This month, we’re back to having some prompts based on the letters in the word August, some based on August holidays, some based on summertime things, and some toward the end getting into the next thing on the agenda, back to […]

Music Recommendation: “Helpless” by The Regrettes

| July 25, 2018

My sister got me hooked on the Hamilton original cast recording the last time I was in St. Louis. I then played most of it for Jeremy while we were driving around in California. He returned the favor by finding me this delightful pop-punk cover of “Helpless.” Enjoy!

Weird Stuff in Seattle

| July 18, 2018

If you like weird stuff and conspiracy theories and other interesting possibilities like I do, you may be just as fascinated by Liminal Seattle’s map of the strange, wonderful, unusual, and unexpected. The Seattle Times reported on this map a few weeks ago, and it’s loads of fun to poke around at it to see all […]

Research Tools: Climate Data Summaries

| July 4, 2018

One of my co-workers sent me a link the other day to the Western Regional Climate Center’s climate data summaries for the western United States. This is a great research tool if you’re writing fiction set in the western United States from the 1960s to the present day and need information on weather for your […]

Music Recommendation: The Smithsfits

| June 20, 2018

One of my good friends posted a link on Facebook to a song the other day, and it basically made my head explode in the best possible way. Somehow, I hadn’t heard of the Smithsfits until then, despite them being a mashup of two of my favorite bands. Just imagine the jangly guitars of the […]

Summertime Excitement

| June 4, 2018

With the end of the school year comes the joys of summertime, including a lot of vacations. For authors, vacations can be a disruption to their normal schedules. But they’re also very valuable as a way to recharge your writing “batteries.” While you’re out and about on your summertime adventures, take a moment to look […]

Fun for Friday: Generate an Espionage Mission

| May 4, 2018

In the course of working on a new story, I realized that I had the main character in mind, but I didn’t quite know what I wanted them to do. So I looked for a random espionage mission generator, and found an excellent one via NeverEngine. With this and the die roller on my phone, […]

Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse: Where is Destiny?

| May 3, 2018

While I was writing Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse, I very much had a setting in mind, but it’s a setting that never was named. Astute readers may have picked up on the clues that I left, but for others, it may have read as a strictly fictitious city. The book works fine whether you know […]