History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Fun for Friday: November 2025 Writing Prompts

| October 31, 2025

I’m not entirely sure where October went, but here we are at the end of the month, ready for the November 2025 writing prompts! This month, the first column comes from Kick in the Creatives. The second column is from Doodlewash. The third column is a new-to-me art challenge, Gouachevember. There’s a very small amount […]

Fun for Friday: Back to DefCon One Instagram Prompts

| October 24, 2025

It’s time for some more prompts from the DefCon One Instagram account! Write a piece about a grocery store in a soap opera. Write a piece where a wicked person is squashed. Write a cozy piece with a stuffed animal and hot cocoa. Then change something to make it weird! Follow the DefCon One Instagram account for […]

Fun for Friday: Solo TTRPGs as Writing Exercises

| October 17, 2025

One of the panels that I attended at Worldcon in Seattle back in August was about using solo TTRPGs as writing exercises. If you’re not familiar with the concept of solo TTRPGs, these are often short games that use a randomizing element like a deck of playing cards, a few dice, or a tarot deck […]

Fun for Friday: Agnotology?

| October 10, 2025

This week’s post is a little less etymology and more about a concept I just learned about called agnotology, which is the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt. The second part of the word is of course the same Greek root that gives us other “-logy” words, and the “agnoto-” is from Neoclassical […]

Fun for Friday: Weird (and Spooky) October Science

| October 3, 2025

Time for more weird science to inspire your writing or maybe just pique your curiosity! With this month being October, I thought it might be fun to focus more on spooky science, and the internet provided! The U.S. Department of Energy has a list celebrating spooky science from last October, which gives some brief summaries of […]

Fun for Friday: October 2025 Writing Prompts

| September 26, 2025

October is my favorite time of year, because it’s the official beginning of spooky season. And it’s time for the October 2025 writing prompts! This month, I decided to do things a little bit differently! I found a total of FIVE lists of prompts for the month of October. However, because everyone has spooky on […]

Fun for Friday: Revolution Etymology

| September 19, 2025

The other day, I started thinking about verb and noun pairs like evolve and evolution, resolve and resolution, and revolve and revolution. But “revolt” also becomes “revolution” when turning it into a noun, despite it not having the “suffix-volve” construction of these other pairs. What gives? This one might not really be quite as complex […]

Fun for Friday: Ideas for Retellings of Classic Works

| September 12, 2025

A couple of weeks ago, the “New Approaches to Older Fiction” panel from Flights of Foundry 2023 went live on YouTube. The panelists talked about classic works that are no longer under copyright and different ways in which those can be made more accessible to modern people. They had a ton of fun tossing around […]

Fun for Friday: Weird September Science!

| September 5, 2025

Time for more weird science to inspire your writing or maybe just pique your curiosity! For this month, I’m starting out with September Thinkers and Tinkerers from Getting Nerdy! This article has September birthdays and inventions from the world of science. Next up is Scientific American’s Science History from 50, 100, and 150 years ago, […]

Fun for Friday: September 2025 Writing Prompts

| August 29, 2025

Here we are with just days remaining before it’s September. I’m really not sure where this year went, though I am looking forward to autumn, my favorite season! This month, I’ve got a lot of autumn-related prompts, which means there’s a bit more overlap between the columns. Column 1 is the Swordtember prompt list for […]