History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Short Stories or Novels: Which Should You Tackle First?

| November 30, 2020

If you’re sliding into the end of November with a brand new novel draft in hand after NaNoWriMo, congratulations! If you didn’t quite reach the end of your novel, that’s okay too! What’s critical in either cases is that you finish. And then? You revise. If you’re new to writing, you may find a lot […]

Setting Goals for 2020

| January 2, 2020

Now that it’s 2020, it’s time to start looking at my writing goals for this coming year! Top of my list for this year is looking for an agent. I’ve got a young adult book that is pretty close to being ready to query agents with, so that’s going to be at the top of […]

Fun for Friday: Having Fun Writing Novels

| March 15, 2019

Check out this article on 3 ways to make writing your novel easier. While not all of the advice will apply to every author, there’s at least some commiseration that some novels are harder to write than other novels. And it’s not necessarily about how many novels, you’ve already written, either. It doesn’t automatically get […]

2019 Goals

| January 7, 2019

2019 is already off to a roaring start, but I’m just now posting my goals for the year. Like last year, they’re largely numbers driven. 43 completed stories/poems and 34 others at least started This seems like a HUGE number of stories, but it’s definitely viable. There are three contests I take part in that […]

Brass & Glass 3!

| September 27, 2018

Last week, I sent off the manuscript for Brass and Glass 3 to my editors at Razorgirl Press. There will still be a lot of work to do before it’s published, but for a little while, it’s out of my hands and in the hands of those who are ultimately its first readers! Getting this […]

2018 Planning

| January 2, 2018

Yesterday, I talked about what I accomplished in 2017. I managed to get a lot of writing, reviewing, and editing done. 2018 will be similarly ambitious! This year, I’m writing a bit more detail about what I plan to work on, so that I can track it better at the end of the year! In […]

2017 publishing

| December 14, 2017

It’s the time of the year when authors are making lists of the stories and other items that they published in 2017, which are eligible for awards. Most of my short stories that were published this year were reprints, but I’ve got a few things to mention! Short Stories: “Justice is Blind,” published as part of Bards […]

Choosing Titles

| August 7, 2017

Whether you’re writing novels or short fiction, titles are important. For one thing, you need them in order to keep track of your stuff. But you also need them so other people can keep track of your stuff. And while you could just call things “Book 1,” “Book 2,” etc., that’s not really all that […]

2016 in Review

| January 1, 2017

It’s time, once again, to look at what I’ve accomplished on the writing front this year! My numbers for 2016: Stories out at the end of 2016: 16 New Stories Written: 9 Old Stories Making the Rounds: 20 Total Submissions: 188 Total Rejections: 170 (+1, +3) Total Acceptances: 8 Stories out at the end of 2016: 22 So […]

November 2016 recap

| December 5, 2016

By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 22 Acceptances received: 0 Rejections received: 12 Stories withdrawn: 1 Resubmissions: 12 New Submissions: 1 Stories out at the end of the month: 22 Really tidy numbers this month. I had one story that I withdrew from a potential market after no response in almost […]