History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Choosing to Not Write Novels

| January 17, 2022

I’ve started this year with an email course on creativity, followed by a virtual class on setting goals and making plans. Both of these have got me thinking about what I do, why I do it, and what I want out of it. The shortest possible version is: I love to write. However, the more […]

Building Productivity

| January 10, 2022

It’s one thing to tell yourself that you need to write daily (or every other day, or whatever schedule you give yourself) in order to grow as a writer. But it’s another entirely to work on growing your productivity. I’ve been working through some exercises provided by the brilliant Jessie Kwak (author of From Chaos to […]

Identifying and Fixing Flawed Stories

| January 3, 2022

As I’ve written more and more stories, I’ve reached a point now where I can draft a story and often see that it’s a flawed story. Sometimes, I’ve grabbed onto something too big for the scope of a short story. Other times, it’s that not much is happening, in spite of having a lot of […]

Writing Advice from Sherlock Holmes

| December 27, 2021

I like to share interesting author advice that I come across, and this post about 10 Elementary Tips for Writers from Sherlock Holmes struck me as a neat approach. Because it’s not writing advice from Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s what authors can learn by emulating Sherlock Holmes (definitely with less of the opium and breaking […]

NaNoWriMo 2021 Thoughts

| December 20, 2021

For the first time in a while, I tried to complete NaNoWriMo this November. If you’re not familiar with this annual event, it involves writing 50,000 words in the month of November. Which, for the record, is sort of a lot. I first tried NaNoWriMo in 2009, and I won … technically, in that I […]

More Gift Ideas for Authors!

| December 13, 2021

The holidays are approaching quickly, but if you’re still looking for a gift idea for an author in your life, check out this list! It’s a great mix of practical and whimsical, and covers a range of price points!

Writing Tools: Decuma

| December 6, 2021

I’ve accumulated a large collection of card-based writing tools, each of which is useful to different parts of my writing process. So I’ve decided to do a series of posts about the various decks I own and how I use them in my writing. Decuma is a slightly different sort of card-based writing tool, primarily […]

Neat Gift Ideas for Writers

| November 29, 2021

If you’re doing some holiday shopping for your writer friends, here’s a fantastic list of ideas that would be neat gifts for a writer to receive! There are tons of ideas here, and some of them might also provide jumping off points for you to consider other options. While many of the links in this […]

Unique Gifts for Writers

| November 15, 2021

It’s time to start thinking about holiday shopping (if you haven’t already started), and that means thinking of things to buy the writers who have made their way onto your holiday shopping lists. You can’t really judge authors for being naughty, because sometimes that’s what it takes to make the words happen. But if you […]

Writing While Traveling

| November 1, 2021

One thing that’s been helpful to my writing in the past year and a half is that the fact that I haven’t been traveling at all. Since March 2020, we’ve only spent one night away from home, which means that some of the advice I’m talking about today really hasn’t been put to use in […]