dawn.vogel | November 21, 2024
Cross and Circle was one of the first long-form pieces I wrote and published. I originally thought it would be a short story, but the word count kept creeping up, and I realized it was actually going to be closer to a novella length (it’s a little shorter than the official SFWA novella lower limit, […]
dawn.vogel | July 26, 2021
I was talking to a newer author of historical fiction recently, and one of the questions they had for me was how much historical research do you need to do before writing historical fiction? My terribly unhelpful answer is, of course, it varies. If I’m writing a short story that’s tied to historical events in […]
dawn.vogel | March 3, 2021
Reading: I’m reading for book reviews, but I also recently devoured When Brains Dream by Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold, which is both research for a novel I’m planning to write that plays with dreams, but also just a fascinating read if you’ve ever had questions about dreams from a scientific perspective. This book does a […]
dawn.vogel | October 29, 2018
One of Jeremy’s running jokes is saying “I don’t know what I had for dinner last night, but I can remember [insert random bit of trivia].” And it’s true, too. He has a huge amount of random stuff packed into his brain. It’s a valuable thing for writers to know a lot of random stuff, […]
dawn.vogel | February 26, 2018
One of the things that I love most about writing is actually doing the research. Some people might think this is odd, but to me, doing research is a bit like being a detective. You’re pulling out the little pieces of information, or clues, and turning them into a story, or solving the case. My […]
dawn.vogel | August 29, 2017
There’s a lot of advice for writers that says “write what you know.” For speculative fiction authors, that can be difficult–few of us have ever fought a dragon, piloted a spaceship, or escaped from certain doom at the hands of a horrific monster. (Your mileage may vary. I never have.) I think that perhaps the […]
dawn.vogel | June 12, 2017
Because my background is in history, I wind up writing a lot more alternate history stories than anything else. I collected five of these to make Unfixed Timelines recently. But writing alternate history means doing some research, and it’s a different sort of research than authors do if they’re writing other types of stories. If […]
