History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Big Pink Book Stars and Rainbows! (Prompt 9)

| August 7, 2026

On Monday, I posted the blank version of this page, and today, I’m back to show you how I used it. The first thing I did was to mark the text, “When it rains, look for rainbows. When it’s dark, look for stars,” to flip the elements, making it “When it rains, look for stars. […]

Fun for Friday: The Big Pink Book of Prompts, Flags and Leaves

| June 19, 2026

So this prompt page wound up with me writing a lot of tiny notes, and it’s kind of a mess, honestly. Instead of trying to transcribe it, I’ll summarize what I’ve got. First off, I identified the flags as papel picado, because I hadn’t known their actual name before. They’re connected to the Day of […]

Following Barren from Beginning to Novella

| August 1, 2024

My novella Barren started life as a short story. The story version, which I started brainstorming in 2013, had a different sort of apocalypse in which only plants had stopped growing. My main character, Lemy, was a much younger woman in the story, having been born after the point when the sea levels rose, creating the […]