History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Quick and Dirty Research for Writers

| March 10, 2025

I recently wrote a lot of flash fiction stories for a casual contest. My stories were all over the place in terms of topics, including a medieval Catholic saint, mushrooms, seventh century Korean and Chinese history, and tea leaf reading, and a few people commented on the breadth of topics, trivia, and knowledge. But as […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Fashion in Worldbuilding

| February 24, 2025

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! The panel on “Fashion in Worldbuilding” talked about the different ways that clothing can be used not only […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Show and Tell

| February 17, 2025

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! I watched the panel titled “Show and Tell: What Works and What Writers Get Wrong,” because even after […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Passive Marketing

| February 10, 2025

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! Jessica Salina’s presentation, “Passive Marketing: How Authors Can Leverage SEO,” is a brilliantly useful watch for anyone who […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Rooted in Story

| February 3, 2025

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! I watched “Rooted in Story: Cultivating the Natural World in Ink” to get some cool ideas on how […]

Why I Write (inspired by Wonderbook)

| January 20, 2025

As I mentioned on Friday, my current craft book is Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer. Within the first chapter, he talks about the concept of a Scar or Splinter that creates an irritation, “some kind of galvanizing and enduring impulse,” that then combines with a need to communicate and tell stories. In the margin of the book, […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Tackling Procrastination and Creating a Routine

| January 13, 2025

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! Amusingly enough, I procrastinated quite a bit on watching “Tackling Procrastination and Creating a Routine.” But once I […]

An Early Novella in Cross & Circle

| 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, […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: How to Write When You Don’t Want To (The Afronauts)

| August 26, 2024

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! The Afronauts presented How to Write When You Don’t Want To, which was a great place to start […]

Self-Awareness and Writing

| August 5, 2024

If you are prone to making excuses to not write or doubt your skill, check out this article about self-awareness and writing. It has a lot of good advice for dealing with those self-conscious doubts that slip into our minds, and how to be aware of their toxicity, while also giving pointers on how to […]