History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Checking In after Six Months without Novel Writing

| July 11, 2022

Since early this year, I’ve been focusing only on short fiction and poetry, and not trying to write any novels or even novellas. It’s been a little over six months, so it’s time to check in. If you read my recap from last week, you probably noticed that there’s a novella on it now. I […]

Stephen Fry on Meter, Part 5

| July 4, 2022

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 1, Section 5, on non-metered poetry from the Anglo-Saxons. Instead of meter and feet, the primary technique covered in this chapter is accentual-alliterative poetry, in […]

Outlining Advice

| June 27, 2022

I’ve got outlining on the brain at the moment, as I frantically put one together for what was supposed to be a simple July project that grew into “no, put that idea down for a while and use this one”. The first idea required a bunch of research, which is done now, but also ate […]

Approaches to Writing Endings

| June 20, 2022

How do you know when you’re at the end of your story? How do you wrap it all up neatly and put a bow on it? This article suggests ten different approaches to endings, which will resonate with different authors. For some of my stories, I definitely see the end when I get started. I […]

Learning Your Pace to Deal with Deadlines

| June 13, 2022

Recently, the NSFWords Thursday evening Twitter chat was about deadlines, and I gave a suggestion that I thought was worth expanding. The question was looking for advice for authors who struggle with deadlines, and I said “I wasn’t really good at setting and hitting deadlines until I had a good sense of how long it […]

Stephen Fry on Meter, Part 4

| June 6, 2022

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 1, Section 4, on meters with three and four feet. Previous sections have focused on the many variants on two-footed meter, while this section is […]

Writing in a Shared World Panel at the Nebulas

| May 30, 2022

At the Nebulas award weekend, I attended a TON of panels, but I spoke on one panel about Writing in a Shared World, with M. Darusha Wehm, Vanessa MacLaren-Wray, and Noah K. Sturtevant. We each had a variety of levels of involvement in shared world projects, from publishers and organizers of all the pieces to […]

Approaching Personal Feedback

| May 23, 2022

As a writer with a lot of stories and poems, I do a lot of submitting my stories to markets. Of course, the flipside of that is that I receive a lot of rejections on my stories. Many markets take fewer than 1 percent of the stories submitted to them. This means that even if […]

Writing Small

| May 16, 2022

I moderated a panel on “Writing Small” at Flights of Foundry, during which we talked a lot about flash fiction and other stories told in very small word counts. I was on a similar panel four years ago, since which time I’ve written and sold a lot more flash fiction and gotten a better grasp […]

Stephen Fry on Meter, Part 3

| May 9, 2022

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 1, Section 3, on other meters. After sections on iambic pentameter and variations, this section introduces lines with fewer than or more than five “feet.” […]