History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Poetry Form: Erasure

| September 27, 2021

Erasure poetry is one of the formats that I’ve never quite been able to get to work well, but it’s still a fascinating form. It’s sometimes called blackout poetry, in that you black out the words that you’re not using, like in a redacted report. Typically, when the poetry includes the black boxes, it’s a […]

Writing When Your Day Job is Writing Too

| September 20, 2021

Some fiction authors find themselves drawn to day jobs that also take advantage of their writing skills. But then, you can end up in a position where both your day job and your hobby (or secondary job) involve putting words on paper, which can wind up limiting your creativity in one or both venues. On […]

Writing Tools: Story Engine

| September 13, 2021

I’ve accumulated a large collection of card-based writing tools, each of which is useful to different parts of my writing process. So I’ve decided to do a series of posts about the various decks I own and how I use them in my writing. Story Engine is an amazing deck-based plot generator. It lets you […]

When Planning Goes Awry

| September 6, 2021

I am very much a planner. I have spreadsheets and planner books and to-do lists that keep me on track with my writing. And even though I make adjustments to them all the time, I’m NEVER without a plan. However, I was supposed to undergo surgery on September 1st. In anticipation of that, I cleared […]

Poetry Form: Cento Sonnet

| August 30, 2021

Earlier this month, I talked about sonnets not being quite as difficult as they’d originally seemed to me. And quite some time ago, I explained the cento. But what if you mash them together? Recently, I constructed a cento sonnet, which took lines from existing sonnets and rearranged them together into a cento, which used […]

Dealing with Deadlines

| August 23, 2021

I’m fortunate that I’m at a stage of my writing career when the majority of my deadlines are self-imposed, rather than external. On most of the occasions where I do have an external deadline, it’s one I’ve chosen to try to meet for a call for submissions or other opportunity. But it’s fairly unusual for […]

Writing Tools: Reckless Deck Worlds

| August 16, 2021

I’ve accumulated a large collection of card-based writing tools, each of which is useful to different parts of my writing process. So I’ve decided to do a series of posts about the various decks I own and how I use them in my writing. I’ve talked previously about the core Reckless Deck, but today, I’m […]

Scheduling My Weeks

| August 9, 2021

I’ve recently switched from using a weekly planner to using a daily planner. Instead of having seven days spread over two small pages, I now have a single day on a large page. It’s both wonderful and a little overwhelming. It’s nice to have space to not have to scrawl what amount to shorthand notes […]

Poetry Form: Sonnet

| August 2, 2021

The sonnet is a poetry form that has intimidated me for a long time. I’m not great at poems that rhyme or have a tightly prescribed meter. And anyway, Shakespeare, right?! He was so good at sonnets, how can anyone else compare? Turns out, Shakespearean sonnets are but one of the possible forms of sonnets. […]

Question: How Much Historical Research?

| July 26, 2021

I was talking to a newer author of historical fiction recently, and one of the questions they had for me was how much historical research do you need to do before writing historical fiction? My terribly unhelpful answer is, of course, it varies. If I’m writing a short story that’s tied to historical events in […]