dawn.vogel | September 11, 2024
The Strange Locations anthology, edited by Marissa Van Uden (Apex Book Company, 2024), is a limited release collection of dark speculative travel guides told in microfiction format. Tiny and beautifully crafted, each of these thirty brief tales hints at a larger story of an unusual place. There were a few pieces that really stood out […]
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 | July 25, 2024
“On the Surface” is a microfiction piece set in a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have been forced belowground due to environmental conditions that make living aboveground impractical. However, the unnamed narrator dreams (literally) of people living on the surface and searches for a way to investigate this possibility. “On the Surface” is only available […]
dawn.vogel | July 15, 2024
I had the idea to write a post about my revision process, but it occurred to me that it’s different depending on the length of the piece I’m revising. When I’m writing novella or novel length pieces, my revision wall is my go to method. But the revision wall is way too much when I’m […]
dawn.vogel | June 25, 2024
My microfiction piece “Seeds of Knowledge” was inspired by watching some videos about the Svalbard seed vault in Norway and imagining how a similar facility on an alien planet, where explorers don’t read the language, might look. Compared to other stories in Dead-Starred Futures, it seems a bit more positive on the surface, but the lack […]
dawn.vogel | June 5, 2024
Addison Smith’s Fractured Realities (2024) is another great collection of sci-fi and fantasy fiction in small stories. There’s a mix of drabbles, microfiction, flash fiction, and a few short stories, with a trend toward stories that pack a lot of emotion into few words. The stories in this collection include a number of previously published stories […]
dawn.vogel | May 30, 2024
My microfiction story, “One Book, Never Published,” is a brief look at how time-travel to prevent the publication of a book filled with falsehoods might turn out. If you’ve been following my posts about the stories in Dead-Starred Futures, you may already know that the answer to that is “not entirely well.” But despite that […]
dawn.vogel | April 18, 2024
I included one very short piece of fiction, “Paint Pots,” in Wreathed and Steam, which is a gaslamp fantasy style piece of microfiction about a magical painter. I also have a number of poems in this collection, which vary between steampunk and gaslamp fantasy. Some of my personal favorites are two involving ghosts: “My Josephine” and […]
dawn.vogel | March 28, 2024
In addition to the short stories I’ve talked about previously, Droplets from the Universe contains a number of joyful sci-fi poems and a couple of very short fiction pieces. The fiction pieces include “Explore Savois,” a microfiction piece written as a tourism enticement for an out-of-the-way planet, and “Life on Pluto,” a very tongue-in-cheek drabble (exactly […]
dawn.vogel | March 26, 2024
“Light for Life” is a microfiction story that looks at a world in which growing plants has become a difficult proposition and the sorts of trades a person needs to make to be able to grow food. It’s certainly a dystopic world, but it also reflects places in our world in which climate change has […]
