History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Exploring a Character Through Avatar of Freya

| May 22, 2025

All of the stories in Avatar of Freya include the titular character, aka Friday Jones / Dulcamara. Friday was originally a character I played in a Cobalt City tabletop game, and some of the characters she teams up with in Avatar of Freya were also characters in the game, played by some of my friends. While I […]

The Non-Player Review of Video Games: Surprisingly Good at Tiger Woods Golf?

| May 21, 2025

Many years ago, I dated a guy who was one of four brothers. All of them played video games, though they had different game preferences. His two older brothers were mainly interested in sports games, so that’s what he played with the two of them. And one at least one occasion, they invited me to […]

My Latest Sci-Fi Publications

| May 20, 2025

Since my last post about sci-fi publications, I’ve had a couple of poems and a short story published, plus some self-published pieces in Weathering Youth! My poem “An Alphabet of Forty-Two,” which is about language in a sci-fi setting where different species are in contact with one another, appeared in the October 2024 issue of […]

Rounding Up Some Panels I’ve Been On

| May 19, 2025

As I’ve been working on panel transcriptions and recordings recently, I thought it might be nice to have a round-up post that lists the panels I’ve been on that you can watch online! “Historians on History in Fiction” is from the 2024 WriteHive conference, where several historians talked about history in our writing, ways to […]

Fun for Friday: A Different Sort of “Spring” Prompt

| May 16, 2025

For this week’s Fun for Friday, I thought I’d do a different take on “spring” and some image prompts. The images are all sourced from Pixabay and were uploaded long enough ago that I feel pretty confident that they are not AI generated. The first image is of a glowing yellow electrical light filament, arranged […]

Strength in A Tarot of Sorcery and Sages

| May 15, 2025

The Strength tarot card represents strength, as is to be expected, but also courage, persuasion, and patience. In A Tarot of Sorcery and Sages, this is represented by a haiku and a poem. The haiku, “rippling waters” (after the first line of the poem), being very brief, mainly deals with the “face value” of the […]

What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening To, May 2025

| May 14, 2025

Reading: Still working through Wonderbook and still reading some fiction to review. Amusingly, I had time to kill at a K-pop concert I attended solo last week between the soundcheck and performance, so I found a seat and read a third of a novel. Antisocial, yes. But it was nice to have a little time to […]

My Newsletter in a New Home!

| May 13, 2025

I’ve recently moved my newsletter to MailerLite, which seems like a great service for hosting it! If you’d already subscribed, I was able to transfer your subscription over, so you don’t need to do anything. If you’ve haven’t already subscribed, you can get in on the sleek new design and the monthly updates on what […]

Completing Wonderbook (Sort of)

| May 12, 2025

I’ve been working through the writing exercises in the appendices of Wonderbook, after having gone through the chapters, but I’ve recently made the decision to not complete all of those exercises. I found the text of Wonderbook very useful to me, and I wound up highlighting and flagging a lot of material that I know I’ll […]

Fun for Friday: The Etymology of Mother and Related Words

| May 9, 2025

Since it’s nearly Mother’s Day, this week’s Fun for Friday is about etymology and mothers! “Mother” is one of those words with very deep roots, across multiple languages. Part of the explanation of this is that “mater” originally comes from Proto Indo-European, which is the root of a LOT of languages. And of course, this […]