History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

2022 Awards Eligibility

| November 30, 2022

It’s the time of year when folks start posting lists of their stories and books from the past year that are eligible for award nominations, like the Nebulas, Hugos, and more. And here are mine! Flash Fiction: “Good to the Last Drop,” The Antihumanist (January 2022). “Turning the Tide,” Daily Science Fiction (January 2022). “Promises Made,” Glittery Literary Anthology Four (February […]

Poetry in Intercity Illusions

| November 29, 2022

Intercity Illusions has relatively few poems, compared to my other collections, and what’s more, most of them were previously published. But what’s represented here includes some of my favorite poems. “Secret Gladiolus” originally appeared in the WLYA 2019 Anthology, alongside a few other pieces by me. It imagines an unusual tattoo and how it changes […]

“The Magnificent Matter of the Mischievous Monkey” in C. & M. Marsh, Girl Detectives

| November 24, 2022

“The Magnificent Matter of the Mischievous Monkey” was technically my third Marsh sisters story, as I wrote it after The Trouble with the Tick-Tock Tabby. It’s also the title in this series I’m most likely to foul up, as it went through a few iterations before I got it to work within my self-dictated naming […]

Have You Checked Out Camp Haunt?

| November 22, 2022

Sometimes, the best reviews for a book you can get are the ones that aren’t necessarily posted online. My mom reads all of my books, and she sent me a message a few days after finishing Camp Haunt. She said she really wanted to read it to see what I remembered about camp, and she […]

Stephen Fry on Form, Part 1

| November 21, 2022

As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 1, on form. The first section on form introduces the idea of the stanza, including its origin, but the bulk of the chapter focuses […]

“The Thing in the Swamp” in Doorways in the Gloom

| November 17, 2022

“De store gamle. Danish, again. Most people translate it as ‘the big old ones.’ It means something a little different to the old Danish families in Selbyville.” “The Thing in the Swamp” is my tangentially Lovecraftian dark contemporary fantasy story, featuring a protagonist who knows what her family has been getting up to over the […]

My Steampunk Books

| November 15, 2022

If you enjoy reading steampunk, I’ve got five books, for both adult readers and younger readers! First off, I have the Brass and Glass trilogy: Brass and Glass: The Cask of Cranglimmering is the first in the series, followed by Brass and Glass 2: The Long-Cursed Map and Brass and Glass 3: The Boiling Sea. These […]

“Kinuyo-yo” in Intercity Illusions

| November 1, 2022

My story “Kinuyo-yo” started with a couple of images, which involved a brightly colored boat, a sense of motion, and not much evidence of a means of propulsion. It turned into a story about an unusual young girl living in a flooded city and figuring out ways to make one of her weird hobbies into […]

Recent Spooky Stories

| October 27, 2022

If you’re looking for some spooky reads of short stories, here are a few of my recently released dark and horror stories! “Memento Mori” appears in Queer Weird West Tales. This story involves Calamity Jane and the detritus of Wild Bill Hickok’s life, along with some surreal and spooky events related to the two. “Dangers […]

Review of The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

| October 26, 2022

The Hacienda, Isabel Cañas’s debut novel (Berkeley, 2022), is a gorgeous Gothic novel set post-Mexican War of Independence. Far removed from the typical Gothic settings of Western Europe, this novel draws upon the universal language of dread and presents a world filled with chilling horror. Beatriz is the second wife of a wealthy landowner, having […]