History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

All About Editing at Flights of Foundry

| June 26, 2023

At Flights of Foundry back in April of this year, I attended and spoke on a few panels about editing and freelancing. While I still work a full time job, I have also taken on a lot of freelance editing projects, especially in the past few months. So these panels were helpful to me in […]

Speculative Poetry at Flights of Foundry

| June 12, 2023

I spoke on a couple of panels about poetry at Flights of Foundry, specifically ones on form poetry and the history of speculative poetry, along with teaching a workshop as an introduction to speculative poetry. Form poetry is a huge topic, one I’ve been tackling here with my slow reading of Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less […]

Stephen Fry on Form, Part 8

| June 5, 2023

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 8, on comic forms. This section only covers three forms, and I would argue that the first of them doesn’t have to be […]

Marketing Makes the Book at Flights of Foundry

| May 22, 2023

One of the panels I spoke on at Flights of Foundry was titled “Marketing Makes the Book.” I shared this panel with a couple of other small press publishers, and we talked about what has and has not worked for us when selling our books. One of the topics that came up was, of course, […]

Climate Fiction as Decolonial Narrative at Flights of Foundry

| May 15, 2023

One of the panels I attended during Flights of Foundry was on the ways to decolonize climate fiction narratives. The panels talked about many of the very common tropes they’ve seen in climate fiction that tend to be from a colonial perspective, followed by ways to tell climate fiction stories from decolonial perspectives. They also […]

Stephen Fry on Form, Part 7

| May 8, 2023

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 7, on more closed forms. An alternate name for this section of the chapter on form could easily have been “closed forms that make […]

Tips and Tricks for Online Readings

| May 1, 2023

One of the panels I spoke on at Flights of Foundry was about tips and tricks for online readings. Learning to give good readings in person is one set of skills. Learning how to do so when you don’t have audience reactions to gauge how you’re doing can be exponentially more difficult. Among other things, […]

Dream Foundry Video Library

| April 24, 2023

Did you know that Dream Foundry has over 150 videos of panels, interviews, and more from previous years of the Flights of Foundry convention? The convention is over for 2023, but you can find tons of writing resources, as well as resources for other creative endeavors, on their YouTube. The videos also have English captions. […]

Stephen Fry on Form, Part 6

| April 10, 2023

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 6, on closed forms. This section covers four closed forms, the villanelle, sestina, pantoum, and ballade. These four forms have some fairly complicated […]

Free Worksheets for Writers

| March 27, 2023

I love sharing free resources for authors, like these worksheets by Jami Gold and other authors! There are worksheets for story, plot, characters, and more craft things, as well as worksheets for business aspects of writing. Take a look and see if there’s something there you can use!