dawn.vogel | August 21, 2026
On Monday, I posted the blank version of the tenth prompt in the Big Pink Book, which had themes of joy and happiness. Of course, I had to take it in a different direction. A while back, I wrote a drabble titled “Tarot Esoterica: The Black Lagoon,” which appeared in This Book Has Ghosts in It. […]
dawn.vogel | August 20, 2026
Chimerical Remembrance has five poems included in it, alongside contemporary fantasy flash fiction and short stories. They cover a variety of topics, but many of them involve social commentary through a contemporary fantasy lens. “The Cold, Strange Globe” was a poem inspired by an image of a glass sphere and a winter scene, which I […]
dawn.vogel | August 17, 2026
This week’s prompt from the Big Pink Book is a mostly open page with four stickers, one at each corner. Clockwise from the upper left, they are: A card from the Winnie the Pooh tarot deck corresponding to a card that isn’t found in any other deck that I’ve encountered. Its meaning is joy or […]
dawn.vogel | August 14, 2026
It’s time for some more prompts from the DefConOne Instagram account! Write a piece involving Atlantis. Write a piece involving candles and house plants. Write a piece about an unusual circus or carnival. Follow the DefCon One Instagram account for writing prompts on Fridays, or check them out when I post them here!
dawn.vogel | August 12, 2026
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (Ballantine Books, 2021) isn’t quite like most of the books I read and review here. But the title caught my eye, as did the description of the book. While this book isn’t explicitly speculative, there are certainly some elements that seem as though they’re not exactly mundane, […]
dawn.vogel | August 7, 2026
On Monday, I posted the blank version of this page, and today, I’m back to show you how I used it. The first thing I did was to mark the text, “When it rains, look for rainbows. When it’s dark, look for stars,” to flip the elements, making it “When it rains, look for stars. […]
dawn.vogel | August 6, 2026
By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 41 Acceptances received: 2 Rejections received: 18 Stories withdrawn: 0 Resubmissions: 23 New Submissions: 1 Stories out at the end of the month: 45 I felt a little like I hadn’t done many submissions in July, but the numbers are better than I thought! […]
dawn.vogel | August 4, 2026
“Autumn Days and Autumn Nights” is a flash fiction piece that involves a necromancer and a graveyard, but that somehow winds up being a fairly sweet and cozy piece. The unnamed necromancer raises the dead, sure, but she also respects and cares for the dead. It’s possibly one of the less creepy stories in this […]
dawn.vogel | August 3, 2026
The next prompt in the Big Pink Book has a handful of small stickers, some washi tape, and a bit of text. The text reads “When it rains, look for rainbows. When it’s dark, look for stars.” The small stickers include three gold stars below the text. At the top left, there’s a Winnie the […]
