History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

NaNo Day… um, what day is it?

| November 29, 2011

So first, I realized that I didn’t want to write my vampire novel. Okay, that’s fixable. Then, I cobbled together an outline for my YA steampunk novel, and it looked awesome. But then I started writing. And I was writing about 1,000 word chapters, because that’s what felt right. But when you only have 25 […]

NaNo Day 1

| November 1, 2011

So I started out at the midnight write-in last night working on a sort of urban fantasy/horror novel involving vampires. I got about 1,300 words done, and called it a night. In the course of that, I switched from third person to first person, because the words just weren’t coming out in third person. Then […]

Pacing Lessons from Hollywood

| October 30, 2011

The hubbie is off at World Fantasy Con, which means I’ve learned a couple of things. 1) Cats do not like it when you try to stick stuff in their mouth. 2) It’s hard to cook for one person. 3) Movies are great for learning how to structure the pacing a novel. I say this […]

Progress Report

| October 5, 2011

Well, I haven’t been quite as productive as I may have dreamed I could be, but I have made some progress on my stories. The untitled fantasy story is still untitled, but it’s nearing completion. I have one scene to write (something that came up in review), and I need to add a bit of […]

What I’m working on

| September 9, 2011

I’m posting this up for the world to see, in the hopes that it will help me to stay on target. Title pending (fantasy with a slight tinge of horror): About 1,400 words in. I’ve tentatively outlined out what the remaining scenes need to be, and now I just have to write them. I’m hoping […]

Collaborative writing

| July 16, 2011

I participated in a bit of an experiment today. The goal: have five authors work collaboratively on a story to conclude an upcoming anthology. Having never worked on anything of the sort, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I also went in feeling a wee bit intimidated, as everyone else involved is a bit more […]

Writer connections

| July 14, 2011

My writing has been slow lately, because I’ve been busy with my wedding, which was this past Saturday. As our guests trickled in before the ceremony, I noticed that our various friends were clustering in small groups. We had the roller derby group, the gamer group, and, of course, the writer group. Most of the […]

Works in progress, and then not

| June 3, 2011

I’ve got a bunch of stories that should be in the works. I almost outlined one of them, for the Steampunk Shakespeare anthology. I say almost outlined, because I’m not a big outliner. Most of my stories just tend to flow in semi-random directions, and then get cleaned up later on. But this story needed […]

Cobalt City: Dark Carnival

| June 1, 2011

I got word today that my short story, “Unexpected Sparx,” has been accepted for the Cobalt City: Dark Carnival anthology, which is due out this fall. The anthology is still accepting submissions, and you can find out more here. There are a lot of really great characters that still are waiting for their stories to […]

Short Story: The Recondite Riddle of the Rose Rogue

| April 19, 2011

I’ve been out of town for a bit, so this is the first chance I’ve had to post here about one of my stories being available online. You can find the story here. This story was originally published in the Steampunk issue of Crossed Genres. It underwent a couple of small revisions before this republication, […]