History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

“Be Inspired” in The Sidewalk Diverges

| April 9, 2024

“Be Inspired” is a slipstream contemporary fantasy flash fiction story about a woman dealing with an unpleasant romantic relationship and how she emerges from that situation. I can’t say too much else about the story without giving it away, though it does involve the aurora borealis in an unusual location! “Be Inspired” is one of […]

New Urban Fantasy Stories

| March 14, 2024

I’ve had a number of new and reprinted urban fantasy pieces come out since my last post on the subject. Here’s where you can find them! My flash fiction piece “The Train Station That Knows What You Need” is a somewhat surreal, slipstream story about a train station in Japan, which was published in Cafe […]

“Consequence” in The Sidewalk Diverges

| February 20, 2024

“Consequence” is a drabble, exactly 100 words, in which a superhero is faced with a choice about her power. I can’t say more about it than that, without giving away too much of the story! “Consequence” originally appeared at Martian: The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but it’s also available in The Sidewalk Diverges.

“The Dame with the Boots” in The Sidewalk Diverges

| December 26, 2023

I can always remember where I got my weirdest ideas, and it’s almost always that someone misread, misheard, or misinterpreted something. “The Dame with the Boots” was definitely one of these cases. I think it was something about a pool shark, and for whatever reason, I pictured an actual shark playing pool, and somehow, that […]

“I Need a Hero” in The Sidewalk Diverges

| October 24, 2023

My microfiction story, “I Need a Hero,” is a look at a forgotten god who finds herself in need of a champion for the modern age, and finds a way to locate that champion and retain them. Because it’s so short, there’s not much else I can say about it, other than to note that […]

“Five Days After” in The Sidewalk Diverges

| August 22, 2023

My story “Five Days After” is one of the many stories that I first had the idea for while riding the bus in Seattle. Bus commuting is normally fairly quiet and boring. Many of the people on the bus are just trying to get to and from their day jobs. But sometimes you overhear interesting […]

My Latest Urban Fantasy Pieces

| July 13, 2023

I’ve had a number of new and reprinted urban fantasy pieces come out since my last post on the subject. Here’s where you can find them! “Hashtag TPE,” which originally appeared in It Came from Miskatonic University, was reprinted in LOLCraft: A Compendium of Eldritch Humor. This is an entertaining look at a college campus tour when […]

“Mind the Gap” in The Sidewalk Diverges

| June 20, 2023

“Mind the Gap” was written to a prompt about voids, so I decided to combine the void of “the gap” with another void. If you’re not familiar with the phrase “Mind the Gap,” it’s an announcement made in London in Tube stations. It may be used elsewhere as well, but I know it from British […]

“Wishes without a Birthday Cake” in The Sidewalk Diverges

| May 23, 2023

I started writing “Wishes without a Birthday Cake” in a writing workshop with K. Tempest Bradford that involved her asking a question to begin the story, followed by additional questions to shape the story as we wrote. While the end result of that exercise needed some editing after all of the free-writing, it turned into […]

“There Is No I in Heavenly Host” in The Sidewalk Diverges

| April 25, 2023

“There Is No I in Heavenly Host” was 100 percent written on a quasi-dare. The editors for a special speculative fiction issue of Friends Journal mentioned wanting to see a story in which a biblically accurate angel dealt with having their name misspelled on their coffee order. So I wrote it. And they loved it. This […]