History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

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 […]

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 […]

Custom Planners through Agendio

| September 12, 2022

I like to start looking for my next year planner book a lot earlier in the year than some people might. And this year, it was a good thing–the people who made my last planner, which I liked for the most part, had discontinued that design. I had almost reached the point of just making […]

When Planning Goes Awry

| September 6, 2021

I am very much a planner. I have spreadsheets and planner books and to-do lists that keep me on track with my writing. And even though I make adjustments to them all the time, I’m NEVER without a plan. However, I was supposed to undergo surgery on September 1st. In anticipation of that, I cleared […]

Scheduling My Weeks

| August 9, 2021

I’ve recently switched from using a weekly planner to using a daily planner. Instead of having seven days spread over two small pages, I now have a single day on a large page. It’s both wonderful and a little overwhelming. It’s nice to have space to not have to scrawl what amount to shorthand notes […]

My Writing Must-Haves

| March 22, 2021

What’s on your writing must-have list? Here’s mine: My laptop. Can’t get very far without it. Because I don’t really take it anywhere aside from the spare bedroom, I have a device that lifts the screen up to eye level when it’s on a table, but that also renders the keyboard difficult to use, so […]

How Do You Use Your Planner Book?

| January 25, 2021

Some recent house cleaning unearthed a couple of my old planner books, which of course led to me flipping through them and seeing how my planner book use has changed over the years. In 2017, I made detailed lists at the beginning of the week that listed what I planned to get done that week, […]

That 2020 Day Planner

| June 15, 2020

There’s a meme talking about how the most useless purchase was a 2020 planner. I’ll admit, I have more than my fair share of things crossed out in my planner this year, and I’m not someone who makes a lot of social plans. My planner is also where I record what I’ve worked on or […]

Submissions Tetris Part 2: Planning

| April 22, 2019

Last week, I talked about using submissions trackers to keep track of the various submissions I have out at any given time. Today, I’m talking about planning for submissions. When I’ve got a new piece to put into circulation, I generally have a loosely planned out list of markets I want to submit it to. […]

Submissions Tetris Part 1

| April 15, 2019

If you follow my monthly recap posts, you may have noticed that I frequently have a lot of stories in circulation at any given time. Currently, that number is close to 60, though it varies slightly from day to day. As someone who writes a lot of poetry, flash, and short stories, and who wants […]