dawn.vogel | February 18, 2025
My flash fiction piece “Little T, Big T” was originally written as a Drawlloween story with a prompt of “ghost,” but it turned into a cute, sweet story about sisters. I’m not sure where I got a secondary prompt for this, but somehow, I got it in my head to write a story about a […]
dawn.vogel | February 12, 2025
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune (Tor, 2020) is a lovely novel of bureaucracy, music, and found family. With a marvelous cast of characters and occasionally hilarious side comments, it weaves a cozy tale with secrets and a reasonable amount of peril. Linus Baker is a caseworker with the Department in Charge […]
dawn.vogel | December 19, 2024
I have a handful of new urban or contemporary fantasy pieces out since my last post about that genre! My poem, “Bad Luck for the Fates,” which appeared in Asimov’s in April 2024, has a somewhat mythological basis in the Fates, but the setting is decidedly contemporary. There are a couple of contemporary fantasy pieces hiding […]
dawn.vogel | December 17, 2024
“Easy as a Bag of Cookies” in The Sidewalk Diverges was inspired by a meme about Greek gods in the modern day. While I can’t remember the entirety of the meme, it involved Cerberus in some way. So I combined Cerberus, Hades, and Persephone into a contemporary story where Cerberus escaped his leash and found a […]
dawn.vogel | November 21, 2024
Cross and Circle was one of the first long-form pieces I wrote and published. I originally thought it would be a short story, but the word count kept creeping up, and I realized it was actually going to be closer to a novella length (it’s a little shorter than the official SFWA novella lower limit, […]
dawn.vogel | September 17, 2024
When I set out to write Promise Me Nothing, I worked long and hard on finding the right location for it. I knew I wanted to have the setting in the Pacific Northwest for a somewhat mild climate. However, I also needed to find a setting that would be far from any mass population centers, because […]
dawn.vogel | August 28, 2024
Alex Jeffers’ A Mourning Coat (Neon Hemlock, 2024) is a lushly written, cozy novella about what happens after the death of a loved one for whom you gave up much of your own life. Set in a world just slightly removed from our own, with a minimal bit of contemporary fantasy elements, the story weaves together […]
dawn.vogel | August 13, 2024
“Black Thumb” started life as a poem, which I revised into a microfiction piece. The general premise remained the same–scientists looking for a plant that the unnamed protagonist couldn’t kill–but it served as a demonstration of how some free verse (or non-formal) poetry and some very short forms of fiction are closely related to one […]
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 | April 24, 2024
Loving Safoa by Liza Wemakor (Neon Hemlock, 2024) is a novella featuring Black lesbian vampires, with aspects of vampirism that I haven’t seen in many stories featuring vampires. But this approach is interwoven into a story that spans centuries and locations. Cynthia begins the story as a mortal woman who is very close to changing […]
