dawn.vogel | March 25, 2024
Every so often, burnout rears its ugly head. For me, it usually happens most often when I’m trying to cram too much into too small of a space of time. But it can also happen when my day job gets particularly hectic, leaving me feeling drained and unable to do anything more when I get […]
dawn.vogel | January 1, 2024
It’s 2024 now, and I’m spending the first day of the year working on a whole bunch of writing tasks, both creative and business of writing related. In the coming weeks, I’ll post my 2023 recap and my plans for 2024. But for today, it’s just a busy day off work when I can devote […]
dawn.vogel | November 13, 2023
One of the panels I watched from the WriteHive online conference was Believable Technology in Fiction. It was a great panel about how to make technology work in your fiction, most often but not always science fiction. The panelists started by talking about technology on the whole, defining it as something that solves a problem […]
dawn.vogel | October 30, 2023
One of the panels I watched from the WriteHive online conference was Breadcrumbs in Fiction: Building a Mystery. Having written a mystery novella, and wanting to write more in that series, I was particularly interested in learning how to do it better! The panelists talked about the differences between breadcrumbs, red herrings, and facts, and […]
dawn.vogel | October 16, 2023
One of the WriteHive online conference panels I watched was How to Subvert Tropes. This panel talked about what tropes are, when they become cliches, and how to then twist those tropes to make them fresh again. The panel started out by talking about how tropes are the building blocks of stories that establish trust […]
dawn.vogel | May 15, 2023
One of the panels I attended during Flights of Foundry was on the ways to decolonize climate fiction narratives. The panels talked about many of the very common tropes they’ve seen in climate fiction that tend to be from a colonial perspective, followed by ways to tell climate fiction stories from decolonial perspectives. They also […]
dawn.vogel | January 23, 2023
For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on productivity heat mapping so I can get a better sense of the best way to structure my days. This is a system by which you look at your day in hour-long segments and see when you’ve had the best productive hours and the least productive hours. […]
dawn.vogel | October 17, 2022
On the heels of the horror writing course I took, I’ve been writing a lot more horror. So it’s only natural to turn to some advice about writing horror, like this article by Tim Waggoner. It has a ton of great points on dos and don’ts that are invaluable to someone just getting started in […]
dawn.vogel | August 8, 2022
I started the year deciding that I didn’t want to write longer works for 2022, unless I came up with an idea that absolutely had to be longer. And I wound up with one of those ideas. And then a second one, when I realized the first one wouldn’t work as I had planned it. […]
dawn.vogel | June 13, 2022
Recently, the NSFWords Thursday evening Twitter chat was about deadlines, and I gave a suggestion that I thought was worth expanding. The question was looking for advice for authors who struggle with deadlines, and I said “I wasn’t really good at setting and hitting deadlines until I had a good sense of how long it […]
