dawn.vogel | July 31, 2025
When I titled my collection, Doorways in the Gloom, I was thinking mostly about the idea of shadowy doorways, like the one pictured on the cover. When there’s darkness beyond a doorway, you never know what might be lurking there. As it turns out, though, the title also really fits with some of the pieces included […]
dawn.vogel | July 30, 2025
The Transitive Properties of Cheese by Ann LeBlanc (Neon Hemlock Press, 2024) is a sci-fi novella featuring duplicated consciousnesses and a cheese heist with wonderful character development and worldbuilding bundled within its pages. Millions Wayland has focused all of her attention on making cheese, after an incident when some of her duplicated consciousnesses rebelled against […]
dawn.vogel | July 29, 2025
When I wrote my first Marsh sister’s story, it was with the idea of the mechanical garden in mind. That phrase was actually a child’s mishearing of “botanical garden,” which I loved so much that I wrote a story about such a place and the people who lived there. From there, I wrote several other […]
dawn.vogel | July 28, 2025
During the WriteHive Online Conference this a couple of weekends ago, I was the host for an interactive fiction Q&A with Livia J. Elliot, an author who co-created the app Unearthed Stories (Android and iPhone/iPad) with her partner. We had a great session in which Livia talked about some of the dos and don’ts of […]
dawn.vogel | July 25, 2025
If you’re looking for some sci-fi story ideas, look no further than ScreenCraft’s list of 101 epic sci-fi story prompts! They’ve got a ton of interesting possibilities, and some of their ideas might be better suited for a longer work, while others could work as inspiration for very short fiction or poetry! Because they’ve got […]
dawn.vogel | July 24, 2025
When I published the first volume of Unfixed Timelines, I spent a day visiting libraries in the Seattle area to find good sources to cite in the essays related to each of those stories. I had plans to do the same for Unfixed Timelines 2, but the Saturday I’d set aside for that fell in late March […]
dawn.vogel | July 23, 2025
The Kickstarter for What Rides at Night launched today! This is an anthology in the Bikes in Space series, and the second one featuring one of my short stories! For this volume, I wrote “Bicycle Built for Two,” which is a sweet story of queer teenagers, bicycles, and Halloween! I’ve read several of the Bikes in […]
dawn.vogel | July 22, 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! “Charming, Not Useful” and […]
dawn.vogel | July 21, 2025
July 11-13 was the WriteHive annual online conference for this year, and as I have for the past couple of years, I attended and participated in a bunch of events! On Friday night, I was the interviewer for an interactive fiction Q&A with Livia J. Elliot. This was a fantastic Q&A, with Livia providing a […]
dawn.vogel | July 18, 2025
This week’s etymology dive is an odd one, related to the Roman God Bacchus (the Greek God Dionysus). I had the thought recently that it seems like the words “baccalaureate” and “bacchanalia” might be related to one another. But their meanings are different enough that I wasn’t certain how they might be connected. Bacchus and […]
