dawn.vogel | June 4, 2018
With the end of the school year comes the joys of summertime, including a lot of vacations. For authors, vacations can be a disruption to their normal schedules. But they’re also very valuable as a way to recharge your writing “batteries.” While you’re out and about on your summertime adventures, take a moment to look […]
dawn.vogel | May 28, 2018
Last week, I talked about getting lost while writing a story. This week, I’m back to talk about endings. Figuring out where to end a story can be tricky. I like to have my endings all tied up neatly, and I like to end things with someone saying or doing something really clever. But that’s […]
dawn.vogel | May 21, 2018
Last week, I talked about getting stuck in the middle of a story. A similar, and yet different problem can be when your story takes on a life of its own, and somehow falls off the edge of your map. Many folks who fall into the “pantsers” camp of writing insist that they just let […]
dawn.vogel | May 14, 2018
Last week, I talked about beginnings. Today, I’m thinking about what happens when you get stuck in the middle of the story. Sometimes, my stories grind to a halt around the middle when I’ve been writing for a while. Pinpointing the reason for this isn’t always easy, but for me, at least, I often find […]
dawn.vogel | May 7, 2018
Time and again, I return to the same problem: starting something new is hard. I often have story ideas in my head, or in hastily scribbled notes, where I know exactly what needs to happen. But I don’t always know how that story starts, or where it starts. I worked on a story recently where […]
dawn.vogel | April 30, 2018
The final writing panel that I was on at Norwescon was about anthologies–both editing them and writing for them. I’ve had a number of my short stories published in anthologies, with more scheduled, and I’ve also edited all of the Mad Scientist Journal Kickstartered anthologies. I shared the panel with K. G. Anderson, Jennifer Brozek, and […]
dawn.vogel | April 9, 2018
Easter weekend in Seattle always means Norwescon to me! I attended a little bit sporadically the first few years I was in Seattle, but now I pretty much go every year. In many cases, we have a table for DefCon One Publishing, my Scary White Girl Designs craft business, or both businesses in the dealer’s […]
dawn.vogel | March 26, 2018
This past week saw me at two separate readings. The first was my friend Amanda’s solo reading for her debut novel, Rites & Desires. But we also put together a Cobalt City group reading, where I read one of my unpublished Cobalt City stories, along with four other authors in the shared universe. And I’ve […]
dawn.vogel | March 19, 2018
We’ve just gotten back from our vacation with friends in Philadelphia. And while sometimes when I travel, I come back with ideas, this was not one of those trips. I got way behind on things I needed to work on, and spent most of the time just relaxing. And that’s the kind of vacation I […]
dawn.vogel | March 12, 2018
How do you make your villain not a cardboard cutout, stereotypical villain like the guy pictured to the right? Monica M. Clark has a great article at the Write Practice about how Killmonger from Black Panther is a masterful example of a good villain, and breaks down the points about the character that make him so […]
