History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

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By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 25 Acceptances received: 0 Rejections received: 22 Stories withdrawn: 0 Resubmissions: 21 New Submissions: 2 Stories out at the end of the month: 27 Pretty normal month on the submissions/rejections front.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 […]

August 2016 recap

| August 31, 2016

By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 23 Acceptances received: 2 Rejections received: 17 Stories withdrawn: 0 (2) Resubmissions: 17 New Submissions: 1 Stories out at the end of the month: 21 August’s submissions look about right to me. I had a photograph that I submitted as part of the 31/31 writing challenge accepted, so […]

July 2016 recap

| August 2, 2016

By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 20 Acceptances received: 0 Rejections received: 19 Stories withdrawn: 1 Resubmissions: 21 New Submissions: 1 Stories out at the end of the month: 23 This month has mainly been about keeping stories moving–a rejection comes in, back out that story goes. I did have one […]

June 2016 recap

| June 30, 2016

By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 22 Acceptances received: 1 Rejections received: 14 Stories withdrawn: 0 Resubmissions: 14 New Submissions: 0 Stories out at the end of the month: 20 (My numbers seem off, but I can’t figure out why right now.) June wound up being a strange month, in which I didn’t […]

April 2016 recap

| May 2, 2016

By the numbers: Stories out at the beginning of the month: 22 Acceptances received: 1 Rejections received: 12 Stories withdrawn: 1 Resubmissions: 11 New Submissions: 1 Stories out at the end of the month: 20 April was a strangely slow month. I did finish one new story and got that started in circulation. I also got an acceptance, […]