Hyba Is Writing

My Scareuary 2024 Experience - A Review As you know, I've been participating in Scareuary for the month of January. Out of all of the challenges that I set up, I decided that I wanted to work on The Coppe's Webbe challenge (of course I took on the biggest challenge!). For this challenge, I generated a random one-word prompt, and used that to write 4 horror stories. Thankfully, I just about managed to finish the challenge on the second-to-last day of the month!  I think the great thing about Scareuary is that there's no word count goal or limitations. It's not like a challenge where you have to write X number of words per month. For example, you could write four pieces of 100-word flash fiction for The Coppe's Webbe, and that would be a successful Scareuary. In fact, you could write one 100-word flash fiction for the other challenges (Lingering Fears or The Unseen) and that would be a successful Scareuary. It creates a flexible writing goal where all you need to do i...

February 2024 Writing Prompts   15 Writing Prompts for February A prisoner is released on Doomsday. A character makes a dangerous deal with a dragon. A man comes home to find his inventor wife has disappeared. Two surfers make a startling discovery on the beach. A scientist tries to understand why animals are walking into a lake and drowning. A new species of carnivorous plant invades an old woman's garden. Seven people set out on a voyage. Only one comes back. An enchanted book transports its reader into a fantasy world. A technologically enhanced character experiences a malfunction. Unable to pay their rent, a character takes on a dangerous job. "One day, everyone will see you for what you truly are." A child keeps sneaking into a library every evening. Plants around the world begin to secrete a toxic gas. A teenager is falsely accused of cheating on a test. A character comes home to find a trail of rose petals leading to their bedroom. They live alone. Do you want even...

My Scareuary 2024, Entry #10: From A Star in the Ocean I'm happy to announce that I have just finished my last short story of Scareuary! This prompt, which I've been referring to as "Born of the Shooting Star" to myself these past couple of weeks, is the story about a shooting star hitting the ocean off the coast of Angola and causing strange creatures to wash up on its shores.     At 718 words, "From A Star in the Ocean" is a short story about a disturbing set of creatures washing up on the shores of Angola after a shooting star causes a tsunami. I'm definitely going to want to flesh this story out a bit more; I see it getting as big as 2k or 3k words as I add more to it. But the general broad strokes of the story are there, and I'm just going to have to go in and add a little more description (need more research on Angola) and finesse the plot a bit. Maybe even develop the narrator a little more.

My Scareuary 2024: Completing "The Star Seal" I'm cutting it a bit close - it is the 30th of January - but here's what I hope will be the last Star Seal-drafting post of Scareuary , because I'm determined to complete this short story and get one more short story completed tonight.    I'm not going to beat around the bush much. Let's just get started with a 10 minute sprint: His lungs struggled to fill with air - air which had been sucked out of the room as soon as they had rewound the security camera footage and watched what he almost believed had been nothing more than his imagination. Almost. And then, there it was, on the screen - undeniable evidence of the monstrosity which had faced him in the archives of the museum.  He shuddered, head in his hands, and tried to focus on his breathing. It had broken through the walls - it had turned them to rubble, as though it took little to no effort on its part at all. Its tall, angular frame loped out of the buil...

  January 2024 Writing Update This month has been very busy for me, but January always is. There's something about the new year that pushes your mind into a state of productivity and motivation, and I always end up taking it just a bit too far, working towards burnout. This time, I think I've just about managed to avoid that.  There's still a few days left in January, and I'm hoping to use those days to finish up my Scareuary and prepare a few goodies for Ramadan, which I hope to share with family and friends. Here's what's been keeping me busy this past month: Scareuary 2024 . Since this is the first year I'm launching Scareuary, I wanted to at least take on one of the challenges. I'm not a great planner - I do things last-minute, generally speaking - so I didn't promote Scareuary as much as I probably should have prior to this year's launch. That's alright; I'm hoping that as time goes by, more and more writers will join in, both those...

 Scareuary 2024, Entry #8: "A New Spring" Replaces "Starlets & Immortality" In this small update, I just wanted to share a tiny little change that has occurred for my Scareuary 2024 Coppe's Webbe challenge.  Previously, I was seriously considering working on my "starlet" story. I even had a name and a fun graphic made for it. Alas, after a little while, I stopped feeling that story idea altogether. I couldn't think of a way to effectively execute the story in my mind, and I wasted a lot of time trying to consider it as one of my four Coppe's Webbe stories. In the end, I decided that I simply wasn't going to go through with this particular short story.    Instead, I ended up writing a short horror flash fiction piece for a zine, which ended up being rejected. I took that same piece and modified it, so that it included something significantly star-related, and edited it. Now that I was able to surpass the 300-word limit of the submission ...

Murder in Heliopolis - January Revision Update JANUARY 26, 2024: As I go through and revise the plot and worldbuilding of this futuristic solarpunk thriller, I'm gravitating towards some new ideas that might end up making pretty big changes into the story as it exists right now. I'm trying not to think about how much work that's going to be - so much more than I originally considered! And I'm also trying not to fall into the perfectionist trap. If I keep refining the story ad infinitum, I'll never finish it. I don't need it to be perfect; no story is. I just need it to be good. Satisfying, for me and the reader.  In the meantime, I have been working on filling out what I'm personally referring to as my Encyclopaedia Heliopolitana . Basically, when I printed out my Murder in Heliopolis manuscript and got it bound, I realized that I hadn't taken into consideration the margins. I was worried that if I printed it double-sided, part of the text w...

What Will I Be Revising for Murder in Heliopolis? As you may know by now, Murder in Heliopolis is the project that I will be focusing on for 2024. I'm hoping to complete the entire book and have it in its final form by the end of the year. I think that's a reasonable goal, but you never really know these days.   I've been going through my manuscript and breaking down its building blocks: characters, settings, unique worldbuilding that plays a significant role in plot, and significant plot points. The following is a list of all of the items which I plan to tackle and refine over the next couple of months: Heliopolis Police procedures in Heliopolis The Hills PATET Analysis Cases Slates PATET Identity Database Greenland Farm Vertical Farms Toma Pom The Floats Nymphaeales Fleur Verdi Laith and Warda's apartment and daily life Warda Yazidi Slate Applications Olivia Fox Crime in Heliopolis Why were Cassia and her husband on bad terms? Cost of living in Heliopolis Aquarius Afa...

My Scareuary 2024, Entry #7: More Star Seal Sprints Another blog post, another set of 10-minute writing sprints for my short horror story, The Star Seal. Once I'm done with drafting the story, I'll move on to revisions and edits, which I'm very excited for, because I'm already getting the urge to go back and edit those sprints I've done in previous posts. In the meantime, though, in order to get to that stage, I have to finish working on this initial draft. (Ideally, if I were writing this myself on a document, I would be editing as I go, and each time I would open up the document again, I would read through it from the start, edit it, and then continue from where I left off. But because I'm trying to share my writing process here directly, it would be a lot more realistic and easier to follow if I take it stage by stage.) Last time, I reached the part where the archaeologist has come face to face with the monster, it has run off, and the security guard doesn...

The Farms - Murder in Heliopolis : Worldbuilding   The solarpunk murder mystery Murder in Heliopolis is as much an exercise in mystery-writing as it is an exercise in writing a good solarpunk story. I confess: at first, solarpunk was interesting to me purely as an aesthetic. It wasn't until I looked into it a bit deeper that I realized that there's more to the movement. At its core, solarpunk is about eco-friendly sustainability with a big focus on community.  For me, there's a very large artistic theme in solarpunk. Yes, it's about sustainability. Yes, it's about ecologically-viable problem-solving. Yes, it's about ethical business and technology. But time and again, I see the visions of various artists, the beauty of architecture which incorporates nature and human living. I know that solarpunk doesn't need to be pretty; that's not its main function - and I know that a lot of these designs are fantasy, and it's unlikely that they could be funct...

List of Adjectives for Writing Gothic Horror If you're writing a gothic horror and are having trouble getting the tone down, or describing settings, characters, or atmospheric/emotional elements, this brief list of words, compiled from the writings of central gothic horror literary figures such as Edgar Allan Poe and Elizabeth Kostova, among others, might be helpful to you. abnormal ageing  ancient barren bitter brutal canine cold corrupted cowardly decayed deserted diabolical diseased drained  dreadful dusty enraging  eternal  fair flaccid forbidden foreboding foreign gnarled grave grim gruesome gruff haggard haunted  inconsolable irate isolated jaded limp mysterious morbid nervous ominous outdated photographic peculiar perplexed preternatural prodigious punishment rattled regretful reluctant resurrected  rural saddening scholarly sepulchral  shadowed  shaky shudder sinister spiteful strange  supernatural taciturn terrible trembling ...

Artspo, #1: Jenna Barton, aka Dappermouth The first entry in what will be a series of entries featuring artists from around the web whose works inspire me in my writing, and whose style I admire greatly as a budding artist myself. Jenna Barton, also known online as Dappermouth ( @dappermouth ), has consistently been one of my favourite artists for six years now. I'm a sucker for eerie art, so I guess it only makes sense! I'm not an art student, and I haven't studied art in any way, so I may not have the vocabulary or technical knowledge to critique and analyze artistic pieces, but I'm going to be talking about what I like - what strikes me in Barton's works - and how it inspires my own. Barton focuses on animals with strange or odd features, usually in eerie locations or situations. Often, they're in places one wouldn't usually find them, or doing things that are a little strange for them to be doing. (For example, there's a lovely illustration of an orc...

  The Old Medina Short horror story, as presented in S03EP04 of Hyba Is Writing: The Podcast.   It was my first time in the city, and the winding roads of the old medina led me deeper and deeper into a maze I soon realized I had no hope of emerging on my own. I wasn't particularly worried at first. I was a tourist, you know, so the whole idea of getting lost in an ancient city made me feel rather romantic. Besides, at the beginning, there were still people around me, and in the late afternoon sun, everything was painted a dreamy golden that lulled me into a sense of idyllic calm and safety. Like nothing could be wrong in the world. I don't know - I just... I wasn't worried at first. In fact, I was enjoying the element of random exploration. It wasn't until I realized that the streets were getting emptier, and the sun was preparing to set, that I began to try to find my way back. I wanted to find my own way back, so I didn't ask anyone to help me, and soon, ...