History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

The Non-Player Review of Video Games: Saints Row Franchise Radio Stations

| December 18, 2024

One of my favorite parts about the Saints Row franchise is the variety of radio stations. My favorites of those are often based on them playing songs I know, though there are also songs I have come to know and love from Jeremy playing through the games multiple times. Of course, the radio stations change from […]

On Kickstarter: Playlist of the Damned

| April 26, 2023

Horror + music? Sign me up! Weird Little Worlds launched their Kickstarter for Playlist of the Damned, a horror and music-related anthology, last week. It’s already filled with luminaries from the horror fiction community, and they’ll be opening to submissions at the beginning of May to fill the other slots in the anthology. In addition to […]

Fun for Friday: Song Shuffle

| April 15, 2022

Have you ever gotten a plot or character from a song? I certainly have, many times over. Drawfee recently gave their artists a challenge to create a character based on the first three songs that came up on shuffle. I think this would be a fun idea to inspire either a character or a plot […]

Music to Evoke a Sense of Time and Place

| May 11, 2020

Since I’m currently spending most of my workdays listening to my old iPod, I’m getting hit with a lot of nostalgia based on the songs. Any random song might send me back to my days in St. Louis as a teen, to my college dorm room, the variety of concerts I went to, or the […]

Now Out: “Despite All My Rage” in A Punk Rock Future!

| October 8, 2019

A Punk Rock Future is out today, and it includes my flash fiction piece, “Despite All My Rage.” I wrote this piece mostly in a single night–I drafted up what I called an angry rant, only my friend Torrey misheard that as “an angry rat” … and I ran with it. I revised the story […]

My First K-Pop Concert!

| September 18, 2019

Last week was the culmination of my frantic watching everything by Pentagon I could get my eyeballs on in preparation for seeing them live. And it was definitely an experience. Jeremy and I both work downtown–my office is very near the theater they were playing–so we met up after work for dinner and drinks, then […]

Fun for Friday: Inspirations from Music

| March 8, 2019

If you’re looking for writing inspiration, sometimes, you can turn to music and find what you need! This New York Times article suggests nine exercises that can be used for students to get inspired to write, but you don’t have to be a student to use these ideas!  

Fun for Friday: Band Name Origins

| November 2, 2018

If you’ve ever wondered how famous bands got their name, look no further! Wikipedia has you covered with this list of band name etymologies! It’s interesting to see the prevalence of names that come from dreams and also from Tolkien. Take a look through and see if your favorites are mentioned!

Music Recommendation: Savage (Songs from a Broken World) by Gary Numan

| November 29, 2017

I’m a music junkie–back in the early 2000s, when large hard drives were pricey, I shelled out for a 300 GB hard drive to house my music. (All that music now lives on my laptop hard drive, with room to spare, because we live in the future!) But I haven’t bought a ton of new […]

Musical Inspiration

| June 13, 2017

Recently, while I was attending an event as part of DefCon One Publishing, one of the volunteers circulated among all of the authors and asked them a simple question: If they were to make a movie of your book, what song would be the opening song? I didn’t have to think too hard about my […]