dawn.vogel | October 19, 2017
Before I moved to Seattle, I was pretty sure that archaeology was EXACTLY like it looks in the movies, all digging up ancient civilizations and running around lost temples. No, wait, maybe that’s just how Indiana Jones makes archaeology look cool in the movies. When I moved here, I started working with archaeologists, and though […]
dawn.vogel | September 15, 2017
Often times when I’m looking for a random inspiration for something to write, I turn to lists that are designed for artists who want random prompts for daily drawings. It’s not that difficult to turn a drawing prompt into a writing prompt. Instead of drawing whatever is on the list, you can write a story […]
dawn.vogel | September 14, 2017
Last week, I finished up the first draft of Brass and Glass 2 (which doesn’t have an official subtitle yet) and started outlining book 3. In doing so, I had a chance to look at some of my characters, their motivations, and the inspirations behind them. One of my friends read the first chapter of The Cask […]
dawn.vogel | September 5, 2017
I’ve been working on pulling together a lot of my old, previously published stories, along with some new stories, into mini collections. The one I’m working on currently is Volatile Figments, which will be a collection of six stories in the young adult/dark contemporary fantasy realm, a number of which feature teenage monsters. Why teenage monsters? […]
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 […]
