dawn.vogel | April 30, 2024
“Bigger than the Big Bang” is a flash fiction story in Dead-Starred Futures involving a flash of premonition and the lengths one woman goes to in order to keep that premonition from coming to pass. Though that might not sound much like a sci-fi story, it also involves hacking and a bit of espionage. Oddly enough, […]
dawn.vogel | April 29, 2024
Before There Were Stars is a little different from most of the card-based writing tools I use. It’s designed to be a storytelling game rather than writing prompts, but the way the game is set up, it works well as both! In the game, you tell mythic stories about a fictional group of people, based […]
dawn.vogel | April 26, 2024
Time for another month worth of writing prompts! It’s my favorite time of year, MerMay, so the first column is the MerMay 2024 prompts! MerMay is a mermaid-related art challenge, so all of these words are meant to be combined with merfolk of some sort. There are a couple of named individuals in this year’s […]
dawn.vogel | April 25, 2024
“Just Add Holy Water” is a fantasy short story featuring a young protagonist working alongside a reanimated skeleton to solve a problem. It’s a mix of fun and peril for the characters, but it all works out in the end–just perhaps not how you might expect. This story originally appeared in Death’s Sting: Where Art Thou? […]
dawn.vogel | April 24, 2024
Loving Safoa by Liza Wemakor (Neon Hemlock, 2024) is a novella featuring Black lesbian vampires, with aspects of vampirism that I haven’t seen in many stories featuring vampires. But this approach is interwoven into a story that spans centuries and locations. Cynthia begins the story as a mortal woman who is very close to changing […]
dawn.vogel | April 23, 2024
“Green-Eyed Phantom” combines three of my favorite things to write–historical fiction, young characters, and siblings. It’s a story in which two pre-teen sisters attend a Civil War soldiers’ reunion with their parents and encounter something unexpected. I based the setting on the many, many old newspaper articles I read about these Civil War soldiers’ reunions […]
dawn.vogel | April 22, 2024
I’ve been back in the swing of working on some form poetry, so I’ve got some new-to-me forms to talk about! The haiku sonnet is a combination of the haiku (or senryu) form and the sonnet form. It also has aspect of the tanka form, which I talked about recently. Simply put, it’s four related […]
dawn.vogel | April 19, 2024
If you’re curious about the etymology of a bunch of fairly common words, check out this article from Mental Floss! There are a ton of words there, and some of them might surprise you! You might also be inspired by this etymology to write something related to the origin of one of these words, so […]
dawn.vogel | April 18, 2024
I included one very short piece of fiction, “Paint Pots,” in Wreathed and Steam, which is a gaslamp fantasy style piece of microfiction about a magical painter. I also have a number of poems in this collection, which vary between steampunk and gaslamp fantasy. Some of my personal favorites are two involving ghosts: “My Josephine” and […]
dawn.vogel | April 17, 2024
If you’re interested in queer plant poetry, check out Sienna Tristen’s Kickstarter for the reprinting of hortus animarum. The original printing of the book sold out, and the original publisher closed, so this Kickstarter is for a new edition. From the Kickstarter: hortus animarum is an exploration of humankind’s intense yet non-romantic relationships and the language […]
