History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Flights of Foundry 2024 Quick Recap, Day 2 (second half)

| October 21, 2024

Catherine Tavares posted her recap of what she attended at Flights of Foundry immediately after the convention. I took a little longer to collect some of my thoughts and notes, but I hope you enjoy! (You can find my previous recaps here.) I’m going to have to do mine in chunks by day, so this […]

Developmental Editing at WriteHive Online Conference

| July 29, 2024

I moderated one panel at the WriteHive Online Conference earlier this year, which was “Developmental Editing Basics for Aspiring Editors.” Though I’ve been an editor for 20+ years, I’ve mainly focused on copyediting and proofreading, so getting to listen to a bunch of talented developmental editors talk about the tips and tricks they use, as […]

WriteHive Panel: How to Self-Edit Like a Developmental Editor

| October 2, 2023

One of the WriteHive online conference panels I watched was a presentation on How to Self-Edit Like a Developmental Editor. Even though I am an editor, developmental editing is one of the places where I’d like to increase my skills, and getting some tips and tricks that can help me practice these things on my […]

Care and Feeding of the Editorial Brain and Body at Flights of Foundry

| July 24, 2023

One of the panels I moderated at Flights of Foundry was called “Care and Feeding of the Editorial Brain and Body”. And while the panelists were editors, and the tips were somewhat geared in that direction, there were also things we talked about that can apply to writers, as well, such as making sure you […]

All About Editing at Flights of Foundry

| June 26, 2023

At Flights of Foundry back in April of this year, I attended and spoke on a few panels about editing and freelancing. While I still work a full time job, I have also taken on a lot of freelance editing projects, especially in the past few months. So these panels were helpful to me in […]

Approaching Personal Feedback

| May 23, 2022

As a writer with a lot of stories and poems, I do a lot of submitting my stories to markets. Of course, the flipside of that is that I receive a lot of rejections on my stories. Many markets take fewer than 1 percent of the stories submitted to them. This means that even if […]

Revising Short Fiction: On Screen or On Paper?

| February 22, 2021

I learned how to edit my papers for high school and college by printing out drafts, reading through them, and marking them up with red ink (or whatever funky colored pens I had). But that was in the halcyon days of dot matrix printers, which, in the household I grew up, at least, had a […]

Self-Editing Tips, Part 3

| August 24, 2020

The devil, as they say, is in the details. While most of my previous editing tips (find part 1 and part 2 here) have been of a fairly generalized nature, today’s tips are getting into a handful of specific topics. 6) Learn to Spot Passive Voice! Passive voice is, quite simply, putting the object before […]

Self-Editing Tips, Part 2

| August 17, 2020

Last week, I shared three tips about editing your own writing. This week, I’m back with a couple more! 4) Listen to Feedback! If you’re writing and submitting stories, or if you have a critique group or beta readers, you may wind up with some feedback on your writing. It’s less common for story submissions […]

Self-Editing Tips, Part 1

| August 10, 2020

Last week, I talked about the different types of editing. This week, I’m going to share some of my tips for editing your own work, or self-editing. I begin with a caveat, as an editor: paying an editor to edit your work is ALWAYS a good choice, no matter how much experience you have as […]