dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | 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, […]
dawn.vogel | 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 […]
dawn.vogel | August 22, 2025
It’s time for some more prompts from the DefCon One Instagram account! I’m now pretty much caught up on posting these, so they’ll appear roughly every six weeks now! Write a piece from an axolotl’s perspective. Write a piece about a young wizard cleaning their room. Write a piece about a mirror reflecting a non-existent […]
dawn.vogel | August 15, 2025
For this week’s Fun for Friday and etymology, I’m sharing a post from Useless Etymology about the Greek word “naus” and the variety of English words that come from that root. As you might guess from the title, it’s about ships, but there are many other words that come from the same root. And when […]
