dawn.vogel | June 28, 2024
July is almost here, so it’s time for the July 2024 writing prompts! This month, all of the prompts come from a variety of art challenges, though all of them are somewhat generically themed. The second and third columns definitely have more of a July or summer flavor, while the first column has some summer […]
dawn.vogel | June 27, 2024
My theme for stories this week is apparently Norway, as my fantastical history short story “Desperate and Rebellious Hearts” is set in Norway, far to the north in Vardo. I started this story with research about the Vardo witch trials in the seventeenth century, and while the witch in my story isn’t on trial, she’s […]
dawn.vogel | June 26, 2024
I finally got to read The Forest of Stolen Girls by June Hur (Feiwel & Friends, 2021), which is her second historical fiction young adult mystery novel, set in fifteenth century Korea on the island of Jeju. This is the third of Hur’s books I’ve read, and I adored it just as much as I loved […]
dawn.vogel | June 25, 2024
My microfiction piece “Seeds of Knowledge” was inspired by watching some videos about the Svalbard seed vault in Norway and imagining how a similar facility on an alien planet, where explorers don’t read the language, might look. Compared to other stories in Dead-Starred Futures, it seems a bit more positive on the surface, but the lack […]
dawn.vogel | June 24, 2024
While talking about books and authors with my mother-in-law a couple of weeks ago, she realized she had read two of the books by a best-selling author we know, but she’d missed that there was a third book. I showed her the cover for the third book, to see if she recognized it (since she’d […]
dawn.vogel | June 21, 2024
It’s time for some more prompts from the DefCon One Instagram account! Write a piece about a map that leads to a surprising celestial location. Write a piece about a rumor with surprising implications. Write a piece about a teacher outside of the classroom. Follow the DefCon One Instagram account for writing prompts every other Friday, or […]
dawn.vogel | June 20, 2024
My short story “Fashion Statement” started out as a flash fiction piece, inspired by the title “The Ladies Wove Baskets of Steel.” Early on in the process, I changed “baskets” to “dresses,” and the original story had a single dress made from steel to dissuade the suitors of a princess reluctant to marry. From the […]
dawn.vogel | June 19, 2024
During the 2024 WriteHive online conference, they announced the table of contents for the upcoming Rescuing Curiosity anthology, and I’m pleased to say that TWO of my stories made the list! “It Can’t Be Sunday Everywhere at Once” is a sci-fi story involving refugees on a long-term space voyage and how one young woman came up […]
dawn.vogel | June 18, 2024
I’ve spent a lot of time preparing to publish An (Un)helpful Guide to Writing a Novel, my non-fiction, tongue-in-cheek, guide for aspiring novel writers. In large part, some of the humor in this book is the fact that I do not enjoy writing novels, but I’ve got advice to share about the process. The other part […]
dawn.vogel | June 17, 2024
During the WriteHive Online Conference this a couple of weekends ago, I was one of the panelists for “Making Each Word Count: A Short Story Master Class.” We had a great conversation about writing and publishing short fiction, from our individual perspectives and offering advice to authors who are interested in that length. The other […]
