History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

A Day in the Life: Finding Time to Write

| September 25, 2017

As somebody who works a regular 8-5 job and writes, some people are amazed that I get so much writing done. Here’s a little breakdown of how I sneak it all in! In Theory I get up ridiculously early in the morning (by my standards, which is 5:45 a.m.) and leave to catch the bus […]

Writing with A Kernel of What You Know

| August 29, 2017

There’s a lot of advice for writers that says “write what you know.” For speculative fiction authors, that can be difficult–few of us have ever fought a dragon, piloted a spaceship, or escaped from certain doom at the hands of a horrific monster. (Your mileage may vary. I never have.) I think that perhaps the […]

Fun for Friday: Building a Story Idea

| August 18, 2017

Building off of the writing exercise I mentioned in my post on generating story ideas on Monday, here’s a fun story idea for you to take and run with. Here’s an interesting looking face, to the left–a young African boy, who looks somewhere between angry and sad to me. (You may think he’s got a different […]

Fun for Friday: Amazing Ideas!

| August 11, 2017

Off at Spocon, we will return to our regularly scheduled programming on Monday, with more on story ideas!

Choosing Titles

| August 7, 2017

Whether you’re writing novels or short fiction, titles are important. For one thing, you need them in order to keep track of your stuff. But you also need them so other people can keep track of your stuff. And while you could just call things “Book 1,” “Book 2,” etc., that’s not really all that […]

Fun for Friday: Interesting Plot Building Exercises

| August 4, 2017

As a bit of fun for this Friday, I found an interesting post that talks about adding layers to your plot. I am particularly intrigued by the Donald Maass workshop exercise, because I LOVE random things. So the idea of randomly drawing lines between characters, narrative elements, and places to see what might shake loose is […]

July 2017 Recap

| July 31, 2017

By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 25 Acceptances received: 0 Rejections received: 22 Stories withdrawn: 0 Resubmissions: 21 New Submissions: 2 Stories out at the end of the month: 27 Pretty normal month on the submissions/rejections front. I had two stories come back that I’m holding to self publish, and I had another story with a […]

Young Readers

| July 25, 2017

I read a lot of books that fall into the middle grade or young adult categories. I really love the middle grade books, because they’re the sort of fantasy books I remember from my childhood. I also write a lot of middle grade stories. The first story I published, “The Recondite Riddle of the Rose […]

My Patreon

| July 11, 2017

Did you know that I have a Patreon to let my fans help me create more fiction? Check it out here! Any level of support gets you access to behind the scenes looks at what I’m working on. Higher levels, of course, give you more. There are even levels at which you can get hand crocheted […]

Upcoming projects

| June 6, 2017

Since posting my May recap, I’ve come up with a few projects that I’ll be working on the coming months. My goal is to put out a new ebook every couple of months for the rest of the year. The first of these was Unfixed Timelines, which collected a bunch of my alternate history stories with […]