History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Elevator Pitching a Book

| August 15, 2017

Since I was at Spocon this past weekend, speaking on panels, I had a few opportunities to tell people about my books. I only had two books with me this weekend–Sparx and Arrows and Brass and Glass. Because Sparx and Arrows is a small book of short stories, it’s pretty easy to describe as “short stories about […]

Story Ideas

| August 14, 2017

On Friday at Spocon, I spoke on a panel about story ideas with James C. Glass and Alex Fedyr. We wound up talking about a lot more than just story ideas (like outlining, parts of a story, and the different ways that screenwriters look at novels), but here’s some of what we talked about. One […]

Choosing Titles

| August 7, 2017

Whether you’re writing novels or short fiction, titles are important. For one thing, you need them in order to keep track of your stuff. But you also need them so other people can keep track of your stuff. And while you could just call things “Book 1,” “Book 2,” etc., that’s not really all that […]

Shared Universes

| July 27, 2017

I’ve set a number of my short stories in a place called Cobalt City, which is part of a shared universe. Right now, there are about half a dozen writers working in the shared universe; a bunch of us are also in a Cobalt City game, run by the creator of the universe (who also […]

Writer Essentials: My Laptop Accessories

| July 24, 2017

I do 99% of my writing on my laptop (the other 1% is usually on my phone or sometimes in Google Docs during my lunch break). But it’s not the newest laptop, as you can tell by the excellent accumulation of stickers. It’ll be five years old this November! In general, it’s still running strong […]

My Giant Spreadsheet of Doom, Part 3

| July 17, 2017

(For the first two posts in this series, click here (1) and here (2).) The image here is a little on the fuzzy side, but since what I’m talking about today is more about the shape of things than the details, I think it’ll work out fine. You can also click on it if you […]

My Giant Spreadsheet of Doom, Part 2

| July 10, 2017

(For the first details on my giant spreadsheet of doom, click here.) Last time, I talked about how the rows on my giant spreadsheet of doom worked for planning out my various projects. Now, we’re looking at how I use the columns. As I mentioned before, each column represents a week, with my weekly calendar […]

My Giant Spreadsheet of Doom, Part 1

| July 3, 2017

For several years now, I’ve been using a giant spreadsheet of doom to keep myself on track in terms of all of my writing projects. Because it sometimes comes up when talking with other writers, about how I keep myself organized, or how I get so much done, I thought I’d give you all a […]

Playing Tourist

| June 26, 2017

Today we’re running around playing tourists with some visiting friends. And though I’ve lived in Seattle for 10 years now, I find that there’s always something new to see or learn when I’ve got friends and family visiting. You may think that you already know everything about the place you’ve lived for years, if not […]

Do you Pinterest?

| June 22, 2017

Several years back, my friend Sara convinced a bunch of authors on a writers’ retreat to join Pinterest, so that we could see her extensive boards of potential character pictures. After that, I went a little Pinterest-happy, making all sorts of boards for projects I was working on, crochet patterns I liked, and even clothes […]