History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Writing Tools: Writer Emergency Pack

| October 9, 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. It’s been a while since I’ve added a new deck to […]

Outlining Advice

| June 27, 2022

I’ve got outlining on the brain at the moment, as I frantically put one together for what was supposed to be a simple July project that grew into “no, put that idea down for a while and use this one”. The first idea required a bunch of research, which is done now, but also ate […]

Using Comics Script Techniques for Outlining

| May 10, 2021

As a firm believer in writing to an outline, I’m always interested in seeing ways that other people approach writing their outlines. In this article, the author advocates for using comic script techniques for outlining. It looks like an interesting way to set up scenes for writing later, as they hit the various beats that […]

Synthesizing Writing Advice into Your Writing

| May 3, 2021

There’s a lot of writing advice out there in the world, and while there’s plenty that is just reiterating what’s been said dozens of of times before, you may also come across new-to-you pieces of advice. This has been happening to me a lot lately, as I’ve been reading writing craft books specific to structuring […]

The Pixar Formula

| August 20, 2018

At SpoCon, Frances Pauli and I teamed up to run a writing workshop for teen writers. Frances did most of the work, arriving with some fantastic worksheets that let us put together an easy idea for a story right there! The worksheets were very close to the “Pixar formula”, which runs “Once upon a time […]

Stuck in the Middle with You

| May 14, 2018

Last week, I talked about beginnings. Today, I’m thinking about what happens when you get stuck in the middle of the story. Sometimes, my stories grind to a halt around the middle when I’ve been writing for a while. Pinpointing the reason for this isn’t always easy, but for me, at least, I often find […]

Inspiration: Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse

| January 9, 2018

As I’ve mentioned before, Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse came out of the 2017 Write Like You’re Alive challenge from Zoetic Press. This also wound up informing the format for the story, too. See, I normally outline using Mark Teppo’s outline structure (which I’ve talked about before), which leads to an 18 chapter outline, with […]

Outlines!

| October 2, 2017

I’ve talked previously about how I track my projects on a grand scale. (If you missed those posts, you can find them here, here, and here.) And I talked a little about keeping track of story ideas here, more recently. But when it really comes down to it, keeping my ideas organized mostly happens in […]

September 2015 recap

| October 1, 2015

By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 18 Acceptances received: 1 Rejections received: 12 Stories withdrawn: 0 Resubmissions: 13 New Submissions: 2 Stories out at the end of the month: 19 So September was a pretty good month! I got two new stories done (witches and machine) and submitted. And I got another story […]