Hyba Is Writing

Keeping Worldbuilding Simple Let's get straight to the point: It's easy for things to spiral out of control and become overwhelming when you're worldbuilding. Much like character profiles, worldbuilding can trick you into falling into a pit of details you'll never really need. And even though it can be loads of fun to create entire worlds with their own cultures, histories, festivals, politics, economic systems, ecosystems, architecture, geography, and so on, you generally won't need to actually flesh all of that out when you're writing.  Don't get me wrong - it definitely depends on what you want out of your story and your worldbuilding, and I myself have gone the detailed route before (hence the SPLITE worldbuilding pack). But I have also written enough stories to know that that's not always the case, and is, in fact, the exception, not the rule. So, today's lesson is going to focus on worldbuilding by necessity.  At its simplest form, this just m

Q: What do you do when you're not writing? Writing - especially if you're writing with the intent to self-publish - is heavy, time-consuming work. It means that when I'm not writing the stories, I'm either revising/editing them, making graphics for them, trying to talk about them online and garner some kind of interest for when I do finally publish them, and so on. I might also be networking, or trying to find a magazine or anthology to submit a short story to. It's a lot of work. In fact, it doesn't really leave you with much room for anything else.  But when I'm not writing, or trying to do the business of writing, I enjoy playing video games, watching movies/series, going out with friends, catching up with my favourite podcasts and YouTube channels, and working on a wide range of other hobbies that I still consider myself a complete newbie in.  I'd like to start doing a little DIY. Some woodworking and carpentry, perhaps. Maybe figure out how to fix p

November 2024 Writing Goals It's November, and the month sort of just crept up on me out of nowhere. I managed to make October productive, but it was a chaotic type of productivity, the kind that fizzles out after some time and leaves you feeling burnt out and tired and not much interested in anything. I want to have a productive November, but I also want it to be an organized, disciplined productivity. Before I get into how I think I might accomplish that (and possibly put out a novel by end of year), I want to list my writing goals for the month. Complete the Prologue for The Black Hare interactive fiction .      (about 30% complete at the moment!) Complete Chapters 1-5 for The City of Light . Get 20 subscribers to my author newsletter . Share 1 free writing resource. I get into each goal in a little more detail later on in this blog post.  I wish I could add more onto the list, but that's already pretty heavy, right? So, how am I going to keep myself accountable, and how am

Printable Freebie for Writers: Sprint Sheets Writing sprints have been extremely helpful for me this past month . In fact, most of the writing that I managed to complete wouldn't have been possible without the help of writing sprints. In light of that, I decided to make these very simple black and white printable tackers, to help you track your writing sprints. Get them here (completely free, of course). There are two kinds of sprint sheets. The first is Time Attack. These are sprint sheets where you have a certain number of minutes, and you try to write as much as you can in that period of time. Simply fill in the date, the name of the project you're working on, the amount of time you'll be writing for, and how many words you were able to complete once the timer is done. The second is Word Target. For this kind of sprint, choose a target word count for the day or any other set period of time, and try to reach it. Fill in the date, the name of the project you're writin

October 2024 in Writing It's been a while since I tracked what I was actually up to over the month. I'm not really sure how I'm going to get my year-in-writing post done come December! But, the good news is, this month has been easier for me to keep track of, and there's been quite a lot happening. I'm going to keep this short and sweet. Submissions First and foremost, I submitted a poem to a magazine and a short story to an anthology. The poem has, as of my writing this, already been rejected, so I'm excited to share that later on this year, hopefully as part of a little poetry book.  I'm still waiting to hear back for the anthology (by the way: this marks my first submission to an anthology, ever!). Finally, I also submitted a small interactive fiction to a game jam. Speaking of IFs... Interactive Fictions I submitted a tiny little IF to a game jam, and I felt so powerful after doing so that it ignited a crazy IF-writing flame deep in my soul. Which is to

I'm trying something out that's a little outside the norm, I think, and that's using Google Groups to create a newsletter. Essentially, you can just subscribe/join the group, and anytime I make a post, it automatically sends it as an email to your inbox. Which seems to me to be pretty good newsletter functionality. I've also finagled it so that you can reply to emails and we can have threads with conversations between members, though how well this works is yet to be seen. Now, I've already tried this successfully with one other person, but I would like to test it with a few more to make sure it works. If you'd like to help me out and are comfortable with it, I'd really appreciate a few volunteers to request to join the group so that I can add you, just to test out a couple of newsletters and see if this actually works. Good to know before you join: You will need a Gmail account to access the group. You will need to be logged in so that it shows you both th