History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Fun for Friday: June 2025 Writing Prompts

| May 30, 2025

May has absolutely flown by, and here we are at the edge of June! For this month’s prompts, I took column 1 from @solarwings junicorn art challenge. While the idea of Junicorn is unicorn themed, I thought this year’s prompts were nicely evocative of speculative fiction ideas, whether you include a unicorn or not. This […]

Sci-Fi Reads in New Moons Under Which to Sleep

| May 29, 2025

New Moons Under Which to Sleep, is one of my shorter collections, containing six short stories, three flash fiction pieces, and six poems. And though it’s quite short, it has a few pieces in it that I absolutely loved writing. The inspirations for the pieces are widely varied and include a repurposed limestone mine in […]

Review of A Crane Among Wolves by June Hur

| May 28, 2025

June Hur’s A Crane Among Wolves (Feiwel & Friends, 2024) is the fourth of this author’s books I’ve read and reviewed. And every time I think she’s written my “favorite” of the bunch, she knocks it out of the park with another amazing young adult Korean historical mystery! Iseul’s sister has been taken away as one […]

“I Was a Slacker Teenage Witch” and “Cat’s Got Your Tongue” in Weathering Youth!

| May 27, 2025

Because Weathering Youth is my biggest collection to date, I’m grouping the short stories and flash fiction stories in pairs for my posts, based on the way they fall in the collection. This lets me look at the connections between the stories and how I decided to arrange specific stories in the collection! “I Was a […]

A Day Off After a LONG Weekend

| May 26, 2025

It’s been quite a long weekend for me, having taken most of Thursday and all of Friday off so I could see Rolling Quartz on Thursday night, followed by Stray Kids on Saturday night. I’m spending today recuperating from both shows (which were incredible!), so today’s a day off from posting. Back tomorrow with my […]

Fun for Friday: DefCon One Instagram Prompts

| May 23, 2025

It’s time for some more prompts from the DefCon One Instagram account! Write a piece about a replacement for a diamond. Write a piece about the requirements for an unusual ambition. Write a piece about a golden seed and what it sprouts. Follow the DefCon One Instagram account for writing prompts every other Friday, or check them […]

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 […]