Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Sabitha: We are delighted to be joined by Dawn Vogel, a prolific author and editor who shares our love for creative timelines. Dawn, can you tell us about your latest work?  

Dawn: My background is in history, which means a lot of my fiction winds up being fantastical history, which is similar to alternate history, but instead of asking, “What if history was different?” I ask, “What if history included speculative elements?” My latest book is Unfixed Timelines 3, where I collect several fantastical-history short stories and poems, and write an accompanying essay that looks at the real history I’ve twisted. I’m also releasing the Unfixed Timelines Omnibus, which collects the first three volumes of this series for a print version.

Sabitha: What inspired you to write this book?

Dawn: In all honesty, it was short story rejections. Editors rejected some of my fantastical history stories because they thought the historical setting was unrealistic or the language was too modern. As a historian, I do research when I’m writing fantastical history to make sure I’m getting the real part of the story right. There are always bits of that research that don’t make it into the story, of course, so I concocted the idea of writing essays to both explain the history and let me geek out about the facts I’d left out.

Sabitha: So, how much research do you do for your books? It sounds like a lot!

Dawn: A bunch! This volume has seven stories and one poem, which meant first I researched the various historical periods, settings, and other such details as I was writing the stories and the poem. Then, when I put together the book, I needed to write eight historical essays. For some of them, I still had an email with links I collected when I was writing the stories. For others, I had to reconstruct my research. Most of the essays are fairly brief, but they frequently were based on me reading a bunch of Wikipedia articles and tracking down the sources for those articles, plus searching my local library for relevant books. I had a stack of library books on my dining room table for several weeks and took dozens of pages of notes just for the essays.

Sabitha: You seem unstoppable—what’s your next writing project?

Dawn: I’m always working on more short fiction and poetry, but my next big project is going to be a non-fiction book about novel writing. It will be extremely tongue in cheek, but I also hope it will be useful to people who want to write a novel but would prefer a humorous look at the process. It’s also ironic for me to be writing this book because I don’t like writing novels! But maybe in the process of writing this non-fiction book, I’ll figure out some novel writing tips that work for me, too!

Sabitha: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Dawn: Unfixed Timelines 3 is on Amazon and the Unfixed Timelines Omnibus is here. My website is https://historythatneverwas.com, where you can also subscribe to my monthly newsletter. I’m on Mastodon and BlueSky as @historyneverwas, and I’m on Instagram (mostly my cats and other animals) as @scarywhitegirl12.