dawn.vogel | March 15, 2021
Roughly a year ago, the company I work for made the call for all of its employees to work from home, as a result of the increasing spread of COVID-19. We thought it would be a short stint of work from home, but for us, it’s been a year, and there’s no clear sign of […]
dawn.vogel | March 8, 2021
There are a lot of tropes associated with monsters, and a huge number of these tropes are racist and ableist caricatures used as shorthand to suggest that non-white people and people with disabilities are inherently inferior, if not downright evil. This article from Mythcreants, “Ridding Your Monsters of Ableism,” gives examples of how monster tropes […]
dawn.vogel | March 1, 2021
How long does it take between when an author gets an idea for a novel and when it comes out? That depends on a number of factors, including the author and their publication process. But the short answer is “longer than you’d think.” Between Facebook memories and archived emails, I’ve determined that the novel I […]
dawn.vogel | February 22, 2021
I learned how to edit my papers for high school and college by printing out drafts, reading through them, and marking them up with red ink (or whatever funky colored pens I had). But that was in the halcyon days of dot matrix printers, which, in the household I grew up, at least, had a […]
dawn.vogel | February 15, 2021
Many people like to read mystery stories or detective fiction, but if you’ve never tried your hand at writing it, it can be a challenging genre to tackle, especially when you add speculative fiction elements. Here, author Tyler Hayes breaks down some of the pitfalls and advice for writing speculative detective fiction. It’s a fantastic […]
dawn.vogel | February 8, 2021
Last week, I talked about starting with a title and writing a story to fit it. This week, I’m looking at something like the opposite: when you’ve got a story, with no ideas for a good title. The first thing to think about when you’re trying to title a story you’ve written is whether it’s […]
dawn.vogel | February 1, 2021
Many authors find that coming up with a title is considerably harder than writing the story (or book, or poem) that needs the title. However, some authors start with a title and write their story to fit that title. But first, you need a title. The good news is that there are random title generators […]
dawn.vogel | January 25, 2021
Some recent house cleaning unearthed a couple of my old planner books, which of course led to me flipping through them and seeing how my planner book use has changed over the years. In 2017, I made detailed lists at the beginning of the week that listed what I planned to get done that week, […]
dawn.vogel | January 18, 2021
There’s something of a perception that French forms of poetry are among some of the more difficult forms. However, if you’d like to dip your to into the world of French poetry, the rimas dissolutas form is one that I’ve found a little easier than others. (Weirdly, the name “rimas dissolutas” appears to be Portuguese, […]
dawn.vogel | January 11, 2021
If you’re like me, you may often have more ideas than you know what to do with, and not enough time to implement them. But equally important to time for implementation is a method of tracking those ideas that works for you. I keep my ideas in a lot of places: I’ve got a tag […]
