History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Review of A Fae in Finance by Juliet Brooks

| September 24, 2025

I learned about Juliet Brooks’ book, A Fae in Finance (Orbit Works, 2025), while I was at Seattle’s Worldcon in August, when I chatted with another attendee who was a friend of the author. When said friend explained it as “human trapped in the realm of the fae but still has to work her day job,” […]

Recent Urban Fantasy Pieces

| September 16, 2025

Since my last post on my urban fantasy pieces, I’ve had a few pieces published! My flash fiction piece, “Propagating Rosa glacies,” appeared in ALOCASIA in March 2025. It involves a mad botanist, grief, and revenge. My short story, “One Person’s Nightmare,” appeared in the Rescuing Curiosity anthology from Inked in Gray in March 2025. Despite […]

Four Years Since Intercity Illusions

| July 10, 2025

Intercity Illusions came out four years ago, collecting a variety of contemporary fantasy stories and poetry, a large number of which had been previously published. It’s fun to look back at that collection and recall all of the pieces that went into it. That includes the cover art, which was created from a multitude of […]

My Latest Urban Fantasy Pieces

| 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Cover Reveal for The Sidewalk Diverges

| January 17, 2023

My next collection will be out February 14, so it’s time to show off the cover! It’s a simple one, based on some manipulation of one of my photos, but I think it works for this collection! In The Sidewalk Diverges, stories about magic sit alongside stories about superpowers, while ghosts, angels, and fae intermingle. These […]