History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Fun for Friday: Choose Your Own Adventure

| June 23, 2017

If you grew up in the 1980s, like I did, you’re probably familiar with the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books. Atlas Obscura has a fantastic article talking about the different decision trees that were used in the different books, including the very complex tree for By Balloon to the Sahara. I tried to write […]

Fun for Friday: The Origin of the Slush Pile

| June 16, 2017

Last summer, my brother and I were sitting at my mom’s kitchen table, both trying to get some work done, and I said something about needing to read slush. He didn’t believe this was a thing, so I looked up the origins of the term “slush pile” to prove him wrong. (Because that’s what we […]

Fun for Friday: Steampunk Name Generator

| June 9, 2017

My husband occasionally teases me about how much I love random generators. This is in part because when we first met, I used a random encounter table for the Werewolf: Wild West game I was running. But it’s also very true. I LOVE random generators of all kinds. Sometimes what they give you is questionable, but […]

Other writing

| May 6, 2014

It occurred to me last night that while I’m not writing a lot of stories lately, I’ve been doing some other writing that might be of interest to some of my readers. The first is that I’ve been playing and running games on Storium. This is the first time I’ve done much with an online […]