dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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. […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | July 19, 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 World Roulette as a worldbuilding tool, which is […]
dawn.vogel | July 12, 2021
If you’ve found my blog, you’ve found the online location where I post most often. But if you’re looking for other places to find me online, check these links out! Facebook: History That Never Was (rare posts) Twitter: @historyneverwas (posts about new blog posts, retweets, and occasional random posts) Patreon: Dawn Vogel (posts about what […]
dawn.vogel | July 5, 2021
The Locus Awards events were online this year the last weekend in June, and while I didn’t participate in a whole lot, I watched a couple of panels that I thought were interesting. One was “Speculative Mood: Making Short Fiction Shine.” The panel wound up being different than I expected from the title, but it […]
dawn.vogel | June 28, 2021
Last week was the Convention of Heroes, an online event hosted by Superhero-Fiction.com. There were a ton of great panels, and the best news is that you can watch recordings of all of them on YouTube! I particularly found the “How to Craft a Hero” and “Captivating World Building” panels useful for someone who writes […]
dawn.vogel | June 21, 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. Though it was originally envisioned as an artist prompt deck, Reckless Deck, […]
dawn.vogel | June 16, 2021
When you’re working on coming up with names for characters, particularly characters of a specific ethnic group or age range, you could poke around a bunch of baby naming books or sites to find other names that go along with ones you’ve already picked out. Or you could check out the Name Matchmaker site. This […]
dawn.vogel | June 14, 2021
The first weekend in June was SFWA’s Nebula Conference Online, and I took a day off work so I could attend a few panels, hold office hours for authors looking for critiques, and watch a little bit of the Nebula Awards (I would have watched them all, but we were gaming during the second half). […]
