History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Fun for Friday: Interesting Words

| July 20, 2018

Writers thrive on words, and sometimes we want to use less common words rather than ones that everyone knows. While the words on this list may not be super uncommon, they’re still some fund words to use. There are two for every letter of the alphabet, which could also make for a fun writing challenge: […]

Fun for Friday: Creepy Photo Prompt

| July 13, 2018

While not everyone will find this photograph of an abandoned bus in the woods creepy, I think this photo prompt is a horror story waiting to happen! Take a look, and see what it inspires in you!

Fun for Friday: Random Prompt Generator

| July 6, 2018

I find that I get a lot of mileage out of really random generators. Today, I’ve found a random prompt generator on Tumblr, which gives you eleven potential prompts for the price of one. (For the record, the “price of one” is clicking on a link. So free.) There are all sorts of ways that […]

Fun for Friday: July Writing Prompts!

| June 29, 2018

It’s time for July’s daily writing prompts! July is all about the summer, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s also about sweet and treats like fruits and freezer delicacies! As always, you don’t have to necessarily go with the summery meaning of these words. There are quite a few this month that could be […]

Fun for Friday: Photo Prompt

| June 22, 2018

While the photo in today’s photo prompt is a still photograph of a video exhibit, it’s still a really cool image, with many individual screens within a neon outline of the United States.  The piece is called “Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii,” by Paik Nam June, and it is on exhibit at the Smithsonian […]

Fun for Friday: Interesting Facts about English

| June 15, 2018

Grammarly has a neat little article including ten interesting facts about the English language, which you can read here. In it, you can learn all about pangrams, ambigrams, and ghost words! The most fascinating fact to me is the last one, which states that the word “girl” did not originally mean a female child, but […]

Fun for Friday: Random Word Generator

| June 8, 2018

Sometimes, you just need to find the right word. Sometimes, any word will do. If you’re in the latter situation, you may enjoy the Random Word Generator. It does exactly what it sounds like–generates a random word. Or words. You can specify things like the first and/or last letter, the number of syllables, or the […]

Fun for Friday: Art Prompts!

| June 1, 2018

Recently I was trying to come up with some prompts to give me ideas for a flash fiction piece, in preparation for some of the flash fiction contests I’m doing this summer. I figured randomly generating some ideas was a good way to practice in advance of getting the real prompts from the contests. In […]

Fun for Friday: June Writing Prompts!

| May 25, 2018

Can you believe it’s already almost June? Time flies when you’re having fun … or maybe when you’re super busy! June’s writing prompts are mostly about summer and vacation. Even though I work year round, rather than following an academic calendar, I can still tell when it’s June, because the streets of Seattle are flooded […]

Fun for Friday: Writing Prompts for Young Adults and Beyond

| May 18, 2018

Here’s a fun prompt that’s a mix of a photo prompt and text prompts. Exhibit A is the photo to the right, which, despite its lack of diverse characters, looks very much like the cast of characters for a young adult novel. (Or a horror movie, but that’s a different sort of setup.) Or maybe […]