dawn.vogel | January 9, 2023
I recently got a big stack of writing craft and books through a Microcosm Publishing Kickstarter, so I’ve decided to work through several of them for reviewing on my blog. Jessie L. Kwak’s From Chaos to Creativity is designed to help creatives build a creativity system that works for them. It tackles topics related to scheduling, […]
dawn.vogel | December 28, 2022
I initially heard The Red Scholar’s Wake (JABberwocky Literary Agency, 2022) pitched by the author, Aliette de Bodard, as “lesbian space pirates” (which is from a blurb quoted on the front cover of the book). I immediately bought a copy, a month before the book came out, based on those three words. It was exactly […]
dawn.vogel | December 26, 2022
I recently got a big stack of writing craft and books through a Microcosm Publishing Kickstarter, so I’ve decided to work through several of them for reviewing on my blog. Unf#ck Your Writing is a guide to how authors can produce their best works, but it’s not about the nitty gritty of grammar and prose […]
dawn.vogel | December 7, 2022
Broken Sky by Morgan K. Bell (2022) is the first book in their fantasy series Skies of Cyrna. It’s a fast-paced adventure with airships, dragons, and a whole lot of magic. Dorian Valmont is the ward of a powerful noble, so when he shows up looking to become an aeronaut, no one expects him to […]
dawn.vogel | November 23, 2022
Yes, Cold Comfort Farm is old enough to rent a car (and then some), but I only saw it recently. Jeremy has been trying to get me to watch it for a while, but the stars finally aligned where I was in the mood for something slightly weird and slightly funny. And this fit the bill. […]
dawn.vogel | November 16, 2022
Apex Magazine: 2021 collects the stories published in Apex Magazine in 2021 into a single volume. Containing eight issues worth of new stories, this is a thick volume with a wide array of speculative fiction stories ranging from humorous to heartbreaking. It’s hard to select only a few favorites from a collection such as this. […]
dawn.vogel | October 5, 2022
I grabbed a Kindle copy of Caytee by Susanna Kanto (Caudex Books, 2022) recently because it was touted as a modern retelling of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. As I’d wanted to read Northanger Abbey for a while, but often find Jane Austen’s writing style a little difficult to dig into, I thought this would be a […]
dawn.vogel | September 21, 2022
Unsurprisingly, we cruised through the first season of Sandman. This is a show I’ve been awaiting since 1995, when one of my college friends introduced me to the comic book. Short version: I was not disappointed when the wait was over! There’s been discussion of the casting and the differences between the comics and the […]
dawn.vogel | September 14, 2022
Corry L. Lee’s Weave the Lightning (Solaris, 2020) is a gorgeous beginning to a series about dangerous magic, totalitarian government, and finding love in spite of the odds. With many parallels to Russian and Eastern European countries and governments in the early twentieth century, the story feels like an alternate history-inspired fantasy world. The main characters, […]
dawn.vogel | August 24, 2022
M. Darusha Wehm’s Hamlet, Prince of Robots (in potentia press, 2023) is an absolutely brilliant retelling of Hamlet that hits every note of Hamlet while updating the story to a science-fantasy future in which life-like robots are the technological battleground between the Danes and the Norwegians. In Wehm’s retelling, Hamlet is Hamlet 2.0, the second generation […]
