dawn.vogel | July 18, 2022
When you’re plotting out a story, a lot of folks go for a linear structure of if A, then B, and then C. Perhaps for some, it’s more of a climb from A to C, and then a denouement of D. But you can also try out different story shapes, and this article offers some […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
