dawn.vogel | October 14, 2025
The Sidewalk Diverges includes 19 poems, which means that poetry pieces are more than half the pieces in this collection. While they all include aspects of contemporary fantasy, their themes and subjects range wildly. Some, like “Agent 355” and “City of Sounds” were inspired by things I saw and heard in Seattle, just going about […]
dawn.vogel | August 12, 2025
“Promises Made” is a microfiction piece that combines a fairy promise and a modern staging of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Though it’s quite short, it’s a story I enjoyed writing, as it makes good use of relying upon common knowledge as a shorthand to keep the word count low. After all, most readers will be […]
dawn.vogel | June 17, 2025
“Fiddle in the Middle” is one of several stories I’ve written that was inspired by a bus ride. The two main characters were initially a pair of older women I saw on the bus at the same time–one all in white, and one all in black. Their juxtaposition stuck in my head, and I knew […]
dawn.vogel | April 22, 2025
“Pivot Hinge” started out as a story about something that was hidden in plain sight, paired with a random quote that is lost to the ages. I originally called the story “Let My Love Open the Door,” and the earliest draft involved a film, which eventually morphed into an album and a music video. The […]
dawn.vogel | February 18, 2025
My flash fiction piece “Little T, Big T” was originally written as a Drawlloween story with a prompt of “ghost,” but it turned into a cute, sweet story about sisters. I’m not sure where I got a secondary prompt for this, but somehow, I got it in my head to write a story about a […]
dawn.vogel | December 19, 2024
I have a handful of new urban or contemporary fantasy pieces out since my last post about that genre! My poem, “Bad Luck for the Fates,” which appeared in Asimov’s in April 2024, has a somewhat mythological basis in the Fates, but the setting is decidedly contemporary. There are a couple of contemporary fantasy pieces hiding […]
dawn.vogel | December 17, 2024
“Easy as a Bag of Cookies” in The Sidewalk Diverges was inspired by a meme about Greek gods in the modern day. While I can’t remember the entirety of the meme, it involved Cerberus in some way. So I combined Cerberus, Hades, and Persephone into a contemporary story where Cerberus escaped his leash and found a […]
dawn.vogel | October 15, 2024
My short story “Under the Bed” was one that took me a long time to get just right. I had the idea for a young girl whose family had fallen victim to a horrific monster that spared her for some time. It wasn’t until I figured out the second character in the story, the now-teen […]
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 | June 11, 2024
“Not Their Real Names” is a semi-humorous flash fiction piece involving a heist from the perspective of the person running the operation as she deals with her hired crew. I made use of a pretty clever trick in this story by nicknaming the characters after pop culture personalities and characters, because by doing so, I […]
