History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Doorways in the Gloom and the Doorways Within

| July 31, 2025

When I titled my collection, Doorways in the Gloom, I was thinking mostly about the idea of shadowy doorways, like the one pictured on the cover. When there’s darkness beyond a doorway, you never know what might be lurking there. As it turns out, though, the title also really fits with some of the pieces included […]

The Mechanical Garden in C. & M. Marsh, Girl Detectives

| July 29, 2025

When I wrote my first Marsh sister’s story, it was with the idea of the mechanical garden in mind. That phrase was actually a child’s mishearing of “botanical garden,” which I loved so much that I wrote a story about such a place and the people who lived there. From there, I wrote several other […]

Researching the Essays for Unfixed Timelines 2

| July 24, 2025

When I published the first volume of Unfixed Timelines, I spent a day visiting libraries in the Seattle area to find good sources to cite in the essays related to each of those stories. I had plans to do the same for Unfixed Timelines 2, but the Saturday I’d set aside for that fell in late March […]

Kickstarter Recommendation: What Rides at Night

| July 23, 2025

The Kickstarter for What Rides at Night launched today! This is an anthology in the Bikes in Space series, and the second one featuring one of my short stories! For this volume, I wrote “Bicycle Built for Two,” which is a sweet story of queer teenagers, bicycles, and Halloween! I’ve read several of the Bikes in […]

Weathering Youth: “Charming, Not Useful” and “Flora, Alone”

| July 22, 2025

Because Weathering Youth is my biggest collection to date, I’m grouping the short stories and flash fiction stories in pairs for my posts, based on the way they fall in the collection. This lets me look at the connections between the stories and how I decided to arrange specific stories in the collection! “Charming, Not Useful” and […]

Wheel of Fortune in A Tarot of Sorcery and Sages

| July 17, 2025

The Wheel of Fortune tarot card represents changes in fortune, the cycle of life, and destiny. In A Tarot of Sorcery and Sages, this is represented by a haiku and a poem. The haiku, titled “spiraling pattern” after its first line, is a brief reflection on fractal patterns appearing across natural things. This haiku is […]

My Recent Post-Apocalyptic Stories

| July 15, 2025

I’ve had a few new post-apocalyptic stories out since my last post on the topic! “Child’s Play,” published in Bullet Points in October 2024, involves interplanetary travel to a world in which survivors have taken up residence in a reinforced junkyard and an injured person on the run encounters some of the young residents of that […]

Four Years Since Intercity Illusions

| July 10, 2025

Intercity Illusions came out four years ago, collecting a variety of contemporary fantasy stories and poetry, a large number of which had been previously published. It’s fun to look back at that collection and recall all of the pieces that went into it. That includes the cover art, which was created from a multitude of […]

My Patreon!

| July 8, 2025

Do you back my Patreon? Backers get exciting perks! I’m currently putting together my next collection, and Patreon backers at $3 per month or more will get a free ebook copy of that collection when it’s out in September of this year. In addition, those backers will get future books that I put out through […]

My June 2025 Publications!

| July 1, 2025

I had two publications in June 2025, but one of them was a BIG one for me! My story, “Last Dam Standing,” appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, which is available now! Analog has long been on my list of markets to which I’d love to sell something, so I was […]