History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Fun for Friday: September 2024 Prompts!

| August 30, 2024

September is just around the corner (and with it, hopefully cooler temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere as we slide toward fall), so it’s time for the September 2024 prompts! This month, all of the prompts come from art challenges of a sort. They also play together in surprising and interesting ways, which I think could […]

“Death, in a Fashion” in Unfixed Timelines 3

| August 29, 2024

Unfixed Timelines 3 included one poem, “Death, in a Fashion.” This poem was inspired by my knowledge about fashion trends that are detrimental to the environment and the human body, as a result of the chemicals they use in production or extraction (or the byproducts of those). It dances through time, including arsenic green, radium […]

Review of A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers

| August 28, 2024

Alex Jeffers’ A Mourning Coat (Neon Hemlock, 2024) is a lushly written, cozy novella about what happens after the death of a loved one for whom you gave up much of your own life. Set in a world just slightly removed from our own, with a minimal bit of contemporary fantasy elements, the story weaves together […]

“The Price” in Dead-Starred Futures

| August 27, 2024

“The Price” is a short flash fiction piece that deals with a weighty subject–in a world impacted by climate change and rising sea levels, what price might someone be willing to pay to save other peoples’ lives. The prompt for this story came from the Furious Fiction Flash Challenge (write a flash fiction story of […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: How to Write When You Don’t Want To (The Afronauts)

| August 26, 2024

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! The Afronauts presented How to Write When You Don’t Want To, which was a great place to start […]

Fun for Friday: End of Summer Writing Prompt

| August 23, 2024

As we reach the end of the summer (for students, at least), I thought an interesting fiction writing prompt might be one of the questions that younger students often write about early in the school year: what did you do on your summer vacation? However, for this, make it fictional! Pick a character you’re writing […]

Poetry in Conceits of Whim and Fancy

| August 22, 2024

Included in Conceits of Whim and Fancy are ten poems, all of which are loosely fantasy poems. Several of them, including “For My Sisters, A Bequest,” “The Sea Sings Back,” and “Old Bones,” were published in other magazines before appearing in Conceits, while others, like “Danse Macabre” and “A Secret in Plain Sight” were new to […]

Review of The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches by Rich Larson

| August 21, 2024

Rich Larson’s The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches (Shacklebound Books, 2024) is a brilliant collection of dark sci-fi flash fiction. With fantastic characters and killer twists, this collection is sure to delight fans of the genre and format! As with most collections, I have a number of favorites, but I enjoyed all of the […]

Recent Sci-Fi Publications

| August 20, 2024

I haven’t had a ton of recent sci-fi publications, but there are a couple of new ones since my last post back in December 2023! Shortly after that post, my story “Gratitude” was podcast on the Manawaker Flash Fiction Podcast. This story had appeared originally at Silver Blade and was included in Droplets from the Universe. […]

Writing Tools: Reckless Deck: Psyche

| August 18, 2024

I’ve accumulated a large collection of card-based writing tools, each of which is useful to different parts of my writing process. So I’ve decided to do a series of posts about the various decks I own and how I use them in my writing. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten a new set of […]