dawn.vogel | January 15, 2024
It’s interesting to look back at the evolution of the way I’ve used planner books throughout my writing career. I have posts from 2019, 2020, and January and August 2021. These trace my shift from using post-it notes on a two-page spread for each week to ditching the post-it notes and shifting to a page […]
dawn.vogel | December 18, 2023
If you’re looking for last minute gift ideas for your favorite writer, check out this list from Cosmo! (No, it’s not Cosmo’s “traditional” fare.) The ideas range all over the place (and come in a variety of price ranges, though there are a lot of higher end items), but I absolutely love the waterproof shower […]
dawn.vogel | December 11, 2023
Back in January of this year, I decided to start working through the exercises in Ariel Gore’s The Wayward Writer. The book contains 78 exercises, which is enough to fill a year and a half if you do them weekly. Because of planned trips in 2023, I took a handful of weeks off from doing exercises, […]
dawn.vogel | December 4, 2023
After not doing NaNoWriMo for several years, I came back to it this year. In large part, this was because Jeremy was going to do NaNo this year, and I joined in solidarity with him. Initially, I set out to write a non-fiction book about how to write a novel. Keeping in mind that I […]
dawn.vogel | November 27, 2023
Are you or the writer in your life tired of standard planners? Check out The Anti-Planner, which is 1) exactly what it says on the tin and 2) a great boon for neurodiverse people! Instead of expecting you to set up your life in a standard planner, The Anti-Planner is all about getting things done when that’s […]
dawn.vogel | November 20, 2023
As Thanksgiving approaches, thoughts often turn to the things we’re thankful for in the world. For me, I’m thankful for the many, many writer’s communities I’ve found myself a part of over the years I’ve been writing. At first, I was part of a small, in-person, writer’s group, which spanned a good chunk of the […]
dawn.vogel | November 13, 2023
One of the panels I watched from the WriteHive online conference was Believable Technology in Fiction. It was a great panel about how to make technology work in your fiction, most often but not always science fiction. The panelists started by talking about technology on the whole, defining it as something that solves a problem […]
dawn.vogel | October 30, 2023
One of the panels I watched from the WriteHive online conference was Breadcrumbs in Fiction: Building a Mystery. Having written a mystery novella, and wanting to write more in that series, I was particularly interested in learning how to do it better! The panelists talked about the differences between breadcrumbs, red herrings, and facts, and […]
dawn.vogel | October 23, 2023
People are accustomed to scientific developments inspiring science fiction, but what about the other way around? At the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, they do exactly that! They look at science fiction works for technologies described within that might become plausible inventions. This article about the program talks about some […]
dawn.vogel | October 16, 2023
One of the WriteHive online conference panels I watched was How to Subvert Tropes. This panel talked about what tropes are, when they become cliches, and how to then twist those tropes to make them fresh again. The panel started out by talking about how tropes are the building blocks of stories that establish trust […]
