dawn.vogel | March 11, 2024
On Friday, the writing prompts were related to genre mashups, and today, I’m sharing an article from one of the Story Engine folks on how you can use the Story Engine cards to create mashed-up genre story plots. The Story Engine cards are among my favorite card-based writing tools, so it’s neat to see these […]
dawn.vogel | March 4, 2024
I’ve been noodling on a fairy tale retelling recently, and I came across this article that gives some good advice on writing such a thing! The one I’m working on may add some additional levels of complexity to this advice, but it’s definitely a good starting point!
dawn.vogel | February 26, 2024
Not too long ago, an author friend of mine mentioned using Freeform, an iOS app, to organize his thoughts on a story he was working on. He added photos of his cast, notes on each of them, and a day by day outline for each of the major characters, along with what happened for each […]
dawn.vogel | February 19, 2024
I’m currently in the midst of revising a novella, and I’ve definitely hit the mucky middle. I didn’t feel like it slowed down substantially when I was writing this part of the book, but now I’m second-guessing everything I’ve written, all the parts I’ve revised, and all the parts I haven’t revised. It’s sort of […]
dawn.vogel | February 5, 2024
Sometimes, I go digging in my old story discard folder and strike gold! Over the years I’ve been writing, I’ve sometimes set fragmentary stories aside. In many cases, I know what I want to do with the stories, but I just haven’t had time to finish them. For others, I’m still struggling with what I want […]
dawn.vogel | January 29, 2024
If you’re looking for a source of weird writing advice, may I point you toward Kurt Pankau’s blog? His theme for 2024 is weird writing advice, which he’s calling Your Mileage May Vary. That second link will take you to all of his posts on the topic to date, which means if you’re finding this […]
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 […]
