History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

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 […]

Posting Video of Readings

| June 19, 2017

Late last year, I was invited to participate in the Girl Cooties website, which features science fiction (and other speculative fiction) for women, by women. One of the suggestions for how I could contribute was by recording some of my stories. Initially, I thought “great! I just tested out recording in my closet for some songs […]

Research for Alternate History Stories

| June 12, 2017

Because my background is in history, I wind up writing a lot more alternate history stories than anything else. I collected five of these to make Unfixed Timelines recently. But writing alternate history means doing some research, and it’s a different sort of research than authors do if they’re writing other types of stories. If […]

Fighting Writer’s Block

| June 5, 2017

Like most writers, there are days when I stare at the blank page, the cursor blinking at me, like it knows that I have nothing to say to it. It’s the dreaded writer’s block, or at least the temporary shut down of my brain that doesn’t want to let me write. Since I try to […]

Tinkering with things that are done

| April 23, 2012

I finished up the edited draft of my novella on Saturday morning, and gave it to Jeremy to look at. In return, he gave me the second draft of his novella (which goes back to the publisher soon for final edits). Almost as soon as my draft was out of my hands, though, I had […]

Jumping on the Kanbanpad wagon

| April 4, 2012

Last week, I spotted a tweet from Carrie Cuinn about Kanbanpad as an organizational tool. I’m a sucker for organizational tools, so I hopped on over to her blog post to read about it. She, in turn, had gotten her inspiration for using Kanbanpad for a writing organizational tool from John Remy. I liked what […]

Words of wisdom from Mr. Crowder

| February 7, 2012

I’m still not back at 100 percent yet, which is frustrating. Though I may be able to get something written tonight. Rather than write a blog post of my own today, though, I’m going to share a link from my friend Nate’s blog. Oddly enough, I was going to write about description today. And I […]

Writing Dialogue

| January 30, 2012

One of the things I struggle with in my writing is dialogue. This is probably not helped any by the fact that my husband is VERY good with dialogue. He’s great at writing punchy and natural sounding dialogue, pretty much no matter what his characters are talking about. And while I can recognize that I’ve […]