dawn.vogel | July 9, 2018
I’ve been getting a lot of writing done recently, and I can credit my word counts solely to one thing: half-hour writing sprints. I had a couple of free days over the weekend, so once I was up and settled in, I started writing whenever the clock hit the half hour mark, and stopped writing […]
dawn.vogel | July 2, 2018
Writing can be a difficult profession because a large portion of the job involves a lot of rejection. I’ve been submitting stories for publication for since 2010. It’s taken some time to build up a large stable of stories, but I’ve got more than 60 that reached the point where they could go out on […]
dawn.vogel | June 25, 2018
I recently learned about wooden maps of Greenland’s coastlines, made by the native inhabitants for storytelling rather than navigation. And while I’m pretty sure that most magazines wouldn’t let you submit woodworking as a short story, it does present an interesting lesson for writers nonetheless. Sometimes, the trick to telling a story isn’t to change […]
dawn.vogel | June 18, 2018
As I mentioned last week, we discovered that there were some errors in the version of Brass and Glass 2 that had been published. It’s easy enough to fix the ebook, but there were a number of print copies that we had ordered for a couple of events that included the errors. We were in a […]
dawn.vogel | June 11, 2018
Because of weird gaps and other oddities in my schedule, I’ve been writing a lot more flash fiction. Flash is always an interesting exercise for me, because I have a tendency toward stories that are too big, rather than very small stories. So it’s a bit of a challenge for me sometimes. One of the […]
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 […]
