History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Fun for Friday: Weird February History

| February 14, 2025

Time for more weird history to inspire your writing or maybe just pique your curiosity! February is called “The Strangest Month of the Year” in this article on Medium from 2018. While it doesn’t delve too deeply into historical events, one might argue that the events it covers from seven years ago are recent history, […]

Fun for Friday: More DefCon One Writing Prompts!

| February 7, 2025

It’s time for some more prompts from the DefCon One Instagram account! A couple of these might sound a bit like winter holiday-oriented prompts, but you can also adjust them slightly to set them outside of the winter holidays! Write a piece about someone with a discerning eye about ornaments. Write a piece about the […]

Fun for Friday: February 2025 Writing Prompts!

| January 31, 2025

It’s time for the February 2025 writing prompts! This month, I decided to use random words from Random Word Generator. Column 1 is nouns, column 2 is verbs, and column 3 is adjectives. I like to think of organizing the columns in this way to suggest a sort of basic sentence as the prompt, wherein […]

Fun for Friday: Winter Writing Prompts

| January 24, 2025

With a lot of folks in the United States (and Northern Hemisphere in general) dealing with winter temperatures and weather, it seemed like a good time to share some winter writing prompts from Reedsy!  

Fun for Friday: Weird January History

| January 3, 2025

Time for more weird history to inspire your writing or maybe just pique your curiosity! Historic UK has a great list of historical events, including that one that changed the beginning of the year from my birthday to January 1st! Just think, we could have been celebrating my birthday right at the beginning of the […]

Completing Millions of Suns

| December 30, 2024

Over the past several months, I’ve been working my way through Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life by Sharon Fagan McDermott and M. C. Benner Dixon. While it’s very different from the last craft book that I worked through, it includes writing exercises alongside the twelve chapters, making it a great read for authors who […]

Fun for Friday: January 2025 Writing Prompts!

| December 27, 2024

It’s time for the first writing prompts for 2025! This month, I took the prompts from three different art challenges. The first column is the Kick in the Creatives January art prompt list, with some of the prompts shortened slightly and Americanized. The second column is from Blenduary 2025, which is normally an art challenge using […]

Fun for Friday: Writing Prompts on DefCon One’s Instagram

| December 13, 2024

It’s time for some more prompts from the DefCon One Instagram account! Write a piece about what happens when you imbibe a potion. Write a piece about how much inspiration a character can afford. Write a piece about the impacts of a cubic zirconia. Follow the DefCon One Instagram account for writing prompts every other Friday, or […]

Fun for Friday: Weird December History

| December 6, 2024

Time for more weird history to inspire your writing or maybe just pique your curiosity! HistoryExtra has a great list of eight weird December historical occurrences (well, one is in January, but I’ll allow it!), which are somewhat holiday themed. If you need more in the “weird winter holiday” category, check out The Debrief’s list […]

Fun for Friday: December 2024 Writing Prompts

| November 29, 2024

We’re coming to the end of the year, so it’s time for the December 2024 writing prompts! Column 1 this month is from Doodlewash‘s December 2024 prompts. For this one, I occasionally took out an adjective related to Christmas or winter. Column 2 is from Kick in the Creative‘s December 2024 prompts. For these, I […]