dawn.vogel | July 8, 2024
Another panel I was on at the WriteHive Online Conference was Historians on History. With a couple of other historians, archivists, and writers of historical fiction, we talked about doing research for our historical stories and how to avoid certain pitfalls of research rabbit holes (not always successful) and how to deal with difficult history […]
dawn.vogel | July 2, 2024
Most of my writing in the Cobalt City Universe has been short stories. My collection, Sparx and Arrows, includes the FIRST story I wrote in that shared universe, “Daddy’s Little Girl,” set in the late nineteenth century, in which a young Eleanor Castile temporarily takes on the mantle of the Huntsman when her father is injured. […]
dawn.vogel | June 27, 2024
My theme for stories this week is apparently Norway, as my fantastical history short story “Desperate and Rebellious Hearts” is set in Norway, far to the north in Vardo. I started this story with research about the Vardo witch trials in the seventeenth century, and while the witch in my story isn’t on trial, she’s […]
dawn.vogel | June 26, 2024
I finally got to read The Forest of Stolen Girls by June Hur (Feiwel & Friends, 2021), which is her second historical fiction young adult mystery novel, set in fifteenth century Korea on the island of Jeju. This is the third of Hur’s books I’ve read, and I adored it just as much as I loved […]
dawn.vogel | June 25, 2024
My microfiction piece “Seeds of Knowledge” was inspired by watching some videos about the Svalbard seed vault in Norway and imagining how a similar facility on an alien planet, where explorers don’t read the language, might look. Compared to other stories in Dead-Starred Futures, it seems a bit more positive on the surface, but the lack […]
dawn.vogel | June 20, 2024
My short story “Fashion Statement” started out as a flash fiction piece, inspired by the title “The Ladies Wove Baskets of Steel.” Early on in the process, I changed “baskets” to “dresses,” and the original story had a single dress made from steel to dissuade the suitors of a princess reluctant to marry. From the […]
dawn.vogel | June 17, 2024
During the WriteHive Online Conference this a couple of weekends ago, I was one of the panelists for “Making Each Word Count: A Short Story Master Class.” We had a great conversation about writing and publishing short fiction, from our individual perspectives and offering advice to authors who are interested in that length. The other […]
dawn.vogel | June 13, 2024
If you like to read spookier pieces, here’s some of my recent horror and dark publications! Unfixed Timelines 3 includes several historical fiction pieces with darker themes, including “Charcoals from an Unidentified Chicago Artist” and “Green-Eyed Phantom.” Though neither of these are horror, they definitely delve into the darker side of history and fiction. My […]
dawn.vogel | June 11, 2024
“Not Their Real Names” is a semi-humorous flash fiction piece involving a heist from the perspective of the person running the operation as she deals with her hired crew. I made use of a pretty clever trick in this story by nicknaming the characters after pop culture personalities and characters, because by doing so, I […]
dawn.vogel | June 5, 2024
Addison Smith’s Fractured Realities (2024) is another great collection of sci-fi and fantasy fiction in small stories. There’s a mix of drabbles, microfiction, flash fiction, and a few short stories, with a trend toward stories that pack a lot of emotion into few words. The stories in this collection include a number of previously published stories […]
