History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Approaching Personal Feedback

| May 23, 2022

As a writer with a lot of stories and poems, I do a lot of submitting my stories to markets. Of course, the flipside of that is that I receive a lot of rejections on my stories. Many markets take fewer than 1 percent of the stories submitted to them. This means that even if […]

Surviving Rejection

| July 15, 2019

As someone who writes a lot of stories and poems, and submits them regularly, rejection notices are a very common part of my life. And while a series of rejections with no acceptances starts to wear on me, I’ve found that as I’ve been writing and submitting longer, it’s easier to deal with the rejections […]

Growing as a Short Story Writer

| May 20, 2019

I started writing regularly in 2009 and lucked out by selling my first short story early in 2010. After that, things were a bit more hit and miss for a while. Between 2010 and 2014, I made a total of 11 story sales, some of them for no payment, and mostly for very small payments. […]

Winston Churchill on Failure

| November 6, 2017

Having gotten a couple of rejections that stung pretty hard last week, this seems like a good bit of advice to open up this week with. Winston Churchill said: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” This is extremely true for authors. Not everything you write […]

Dealing with Rejection

| October 9, 2017

I sent out my first short story to a market in 2011. In the six years that have followed, I’ve sent out stories about 650 times (and counting). And at the moment, I’ve gotten just over 30 acceptances. That makes my acceptance rate right about half of a percent. Which means that 99.5 percent of […]