dawn.vogel | May 31, 2023
The Killing Grounds by Joan Tierney (Neon Hemlock, 2023) is a dark near-contemporary novella, set in a dystopia that doesn’t look too different from our own world. It’s an often grim look at the haves and have-nots, while dealing with issues of memories, family, and small communities. Bina works for a passenger transportation company, but […]
dawn.vogel | May 30, 2023
“The Shell Game” started out as a flash fiction piece, but it quickly became apparent that there was more to the story than would fit within the bounds of flash. It’s still a relatively short story, but it needed the extra room to breathe and really make the heist work. And that is, in essence, […]
dawn.vogel | May 29, 2023
Jeremy and I spent two weeks visiting Japan (we actually got back a week ago), primarily in Kyoto and Tokyo, but also with a wild dash along the Sea of Japan/East Sea. We were part of a tour group, so we had a lot of our time and activities pre-scheduled, but we also got some […]
dawn.vogel | May 26, 2023
It’s almost a week until June begins, but with the way May ends, this is the time for the June writing prompts! This month, I’ve set the WayBack Machine to several old lists of prompts. Column 1 comes from a 2016 6-word writing challenge. Column 2 comes from 2020 writing prompts. And column 3 comes […]
dawn.vogel | May 25, 2023
“The House Provides” is a story I’ve been trying to write for years. It started out with a very solid and creepy image, and I have pages of notes on what I wanted to do with it. In the end, though, I wound up with a different story than I’d imagined, though it still has […]
dawn.vogel | May 24, 2023
In a couple of weeks, WriteHive is having their annual conference (online) from June 9-11, 2023, and it’s free to attend! There are a ton of great panels and discussions, plus some readings from authors on the Discord. I’ll be helping out with some of the backend things both ahead of and during the conference, […]
dawn.vogel | May 23, 2023
I started writing “Wishes without a Birthday Cake” in a writing workshop with K. Tempest Bradford that involved her asking a question to begin the story, followed by additional questions to shape the story as we wrote. While the end result of that exercise needed some editing after all of the free-writing, it turned into […]
dawn.vogel | May 22, 2023
One of the panels I spoke on at Flights of Foundry was titled “Marketing Makes the Book.” I shared this panel with a couple of other small press publishers, and we talked about what has and has not worked for us when selling our books. One of the topics that came up was, of course, […]
dawn.vogel | May 19, 2023
Sometimes, even non-fiction writing prompts can be a good source of inspiration if you look at them from a fictional lens. For example, the writing prompts offered here are meant to be more of journaling exercises. But you could also use them to stretch your fiction writing skills by writing them from the perspective of […]
dawn.vogel | May 18, 2023
I have two post-apocalyptic novellas: Barren and Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse. The former is an apocalypse that hit within the main character’s lifetime, but as an older protagonist, she’s lived in a post-apocalyptic world for longer than she spent in the pre-apocalyptic world. The latter is an immediately recent apocalypse, one that hits just […]
