dawn.vogel | August 21, 2017
Last weekend, I was on a panel at Spocon on undead in mythology and legend with Grivante and Fallon Jones. Both Grivante and Fallon Jones have books featuring zombies, while I have a couple of short stories featuring zombies (“The Glorious Dead,” which can be found in Unfixed Timelines, and “Origin Story,” which appeared in Black Girl […]
dawn.vogel | August 18, 2017
Building off of the writing exercise I mentioned in my post on generating story ideas on Monday, here’s a fun story idea for you to take and run with. Here’s an interesting looking face, to the left–a young African boy, who looks somewhere between angry and sad to me. (You may think he’s got a different […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | August 4, 2017
As a bit of fun for this Friday, I found an interesting post that talks about adding layers to your plot. I am particularly intrigued by the Donald Maass workshop exercise, because I LOVE random things. So the idea of randomly drawing lines between characters, narrative elements, and places to see what might shake loose is […]
dawn.vogel | July 28, 2017
I’ve been in Kansas City this week for work, so I decided to share this list of 30 fun facts about Kansas City! My favorite item on this list, which is something I never knew before, is that Kansas City ignored Prohibition. Digging a little deeper, it seems that the State of Missouri as a […]
dawn.vogel | July 25, 2017
I read a lot of books that fall into the middle grade or young adult categories. I really love the middle grade books, because they’re the sort of fantasy books I remember from my childhood. I also write a lot of middle grade stories. The first story I published, “The Recondite Riddle of the Rose […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | June 13, 2017
Recently, while I was attending an event as part of DefCon One Publishing, one of the volunteers circulated among all of the authors and asked them a simple question: If they were to make a movie of your book, what song would be the opening song? I didn’t have to think too hard about my […]
dawn.vogel | October 17, 2016
Where do authors get their story ideas, anyway? In honor of the book release for Untethered: A Magic iPhone Anthology, four authors divulge their inspirations. Untethered: A Magic iPhone Anthology is a fictional collection of twenty stories about the intersection of magic and tech, so real life phone interaction must have meant something, right? Maybe. […]
