dawn.vogel | June 30, 2025
Today I have a guest post from Marie Vibbert, author of Galactic Hellcats and the forthcoming Andrei and the Hellcats (among many other publications). I asked Marie to talk a bit about writing a stand-alone sequel for this guest post! How to Write a Stand-Alone Sequel My first novel, Galactic Hellcats, was a big hit for the […]
dawn.vogel | June 23, 2025
If someone is picking up your book, whether physically or at an online retailer, they’re likely going to make their choice to buy your book based on the back of the book blurb. And if you’re a self-published author, you’ll be the one writing that back of the book blurb. While I don’t think writing […]
dawn.vogel | June 9, 2025
If you’re looking for a bunch of great writer advice, check out the Reach Your Apex blog! They’ve got guest posts from fantastic authors, some of which are in video format, on a variety of writerly topics! Reach Your Apex also offers workshops, and you can subscribe to their newsletter to get information about blog […]
dawn.vogel | May 19, 2025
As I’ve been working on panel transcriptions and recordings recently, I thought it might be nice to have a round-up post that lists the panels I’ve been on that you can watch online! “Historians on History in Fiction” is from the 2024 WriteHive conference, where several historians talked about history in our writing, ways to […]
dawn.vogel | May 12, 2025
I’ve been working through the writing exercises in the appendices of Wonderbook, after having gone through the chapters, but I’ve recently made the decision to not complete all of those exercises. I found the text of Wonderbook very useful to me, and I wound up highlighting and flagging a lot of material that I know I’ll […]
dawn.vogel | May 5, 2025
There’s a lot of writing advice that tells authors to remove passive voice, adverbs, and more. And while these things can be useful ideas to keep in mind when you’re editing your writing, there’s a lot more nuance to these “rules” than is initially apparent. Some people take “remove passive voice” to mean “never use […]
dawn.vogel | April 28, 2025
If you’re writing a character with a secret, how might you portray that through your writing? The Character Secret Thesaurus from Writers Helping Writers is a great place to start! The Character Secret Thesaurus is a database in progress that presents a number of secrets a character might be keeping, along with specific details that […]
dawn.vogel | April 14, 2025
Last Monday, I talked about external character conflicts, and how those are the sort of “conflict” that many authors are thinking of when they talk about the subject. At the end of that post, I started to dip a little bit into internal character conflicts, which is what I’m talking about today. Most people have […]
dawn.vogel | April 7, 2025
When most authors talk about the need for “conflict” to drive a story, they’re talking about external character conflicts. Most often, this is distilled down even further to a protagonist vs. an antagonist. And while that’s certainly one way to generate conflict to drive a story, it’s not the only option! External character conflicts can […]
dawn.vogel | March 31, 2025
During the gaming convention I was at recently, I played in a couple of games that involved a lot of collaborative storytelling. It was fun for me to get to stretch some of my writing muscles in a setting where I wasn’t writing down the results, but rather working with other people to shape the […]
