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 […]
dawn.vogel | May 23, 2022
As a writer with a lot of stories and poems, I do a lot of submitting my stories to markets. Of course, the flipside of that is that I receive a lot of rejections on my stories. Many markets take fewer than 1 percent of the stories submitted to them. This means that even if […]
dawn.vogel | May 3, 2022
By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 137 Acceptances received: 2 Rejections received: 71 (+3) Stories withdrawn: 0 Resubmissions: 44 New Submissions: 3 Stories out at the end of the month: 107 My submission numbers are a little on the low side this month, which is partially a result of retiring […]
dawn.vogel | December 20, 2021
For the first time in a while, I tried to complete NaNoWriMo this November. If you’re not familiar with this annual event, it involves writing 50,000 words in the month of November. Which, for the record, is sort of a lot. I first tried NaNoWriMo in 2009, and I won … technically, in that I […]
dawn.vogel | November 1, 2021
One thing that’s been helpful to my writing in the past year and a half is that the fact that I haven’t been traveling at all. Since March 2020, we’ve only spent one night away from home, which means that some of the advice I’m talking about today really hasn’t been put to use in […]
