Horrific Interning

• Do you want to learn about the growth… or at least the efforts to survive… of a small indie press?
• Do you want experience reading and making decisions about submissions for paid publication?
• Do you like provocative, scary, and strange storytelling and seek connections with similar interests?

You might enjoy and benefit from an unpaid internship with Horrific Scribblings, LLC!

Interns become Editorial Assistants and participate in as many aspects of running the company as possible, working on independent as well as collaborative projects tailored to their goals and interests. If you’d like to apply, please send an email about your interests with an attached resume or CV to horrificscribblings@gmail.com. The internship is entirely digital, so locations aren’t immediately relevant.

What is the internship?

From the official offer letter: “The internship is primarily an educational opportunity for you (the intern) to gain valuable insight and experience by working with the publisher on as many aspects of the company’s business as possible.” All internships should really be about the intern’s learning, and unpaid internships should really be compensating with education since they’re not compensating with money. I (the publisher, L. Andrew Cooper) take the education aspect a little more seriously than most might because I worked as a professor for more than a decade and supervised adults of all ages from the undergraduate to the postdoctoral level. That letter I just quoted spells out learning objectives and outcomes like a syllabus might. The major bullets are evaluating submissions, publication development, market research and outreach, promotional development, and task management and self-reporting. Work in all areas target skills especially relevant to the interests of writers and people with goals in publishing, but skills developed have broad applications. The internship builds the intern… and the intern’s resume.

Former Editorial Assistant Jack Conway observed, “I learned a lot about some of the common mistakes that we see with submissions. I think a lot of the time people submit work that just isn’t ready or hasn’t been reviewed by other people enough. After this internship, when I submit my work to a publisher, I’ll make sure to put it through an extensive editing process.” He also remarked, “I was able to choose the direction that my work would go in, but I was able to try a few different things before I knew what I wanted to focus on.”

Editorial Assistant (and also Editor) H.J. Dutton noted, “I didn’t think my credentials would end up on an ebook next to a published author, at least not this early in my career.”

What qualifications do I need to be selected for an internship?

Everyone I’ve signed up for the internship so far has been actively pursuing publication and recognition as a creative writer and has held or been pursuing a relevant degree (in English, Creative Writing, Communication–Technical, Marketing, etc.). I see that trend continuing, but if you have a really compelling reason for seeking the internship without having such a background, please explain it in an email and include your resume. I seek the unconventional in co-workers as well as fiction.

Note that because I have taken care in designing this internship as an educational opportunity, it might qualify for course credit or work placement requirements in some college/university programs. I’m happy to work with institutional program coordinators if this internship might help you advance in a parallel pursuit–the more a colleague gets out of our work together, the happier I am!

Back to basics. If you have publications and/or relevant education, you have evidence of knowing how to write–important–but you should, of course, realize that your email of interest and resume/CV are writing samples. I can’t trust someone to evaluate others’ writing if I’m not confident that person knows how to write.

Whether you’re 20 or 80, you should be at a place in your career/life where you want to share and develop ideas in an open but structured manner and likewise receive and adjust to critical feedback as part of the learning process. I set a lot of my priorities and shape many aspects of my company according to suggestions from Editorial Assistants, but, to be blunt, if your goal is to direct the company’s development without regard to the structure and feedback that I provide in order to make the internship a learning experience, you should not apply.

“The most important skill I think I’ve built during this internship is a keener eye for error and less tolerance for those errors. The number of works I’ve marked for further examination has decreased significantly, which I think is for the best,” H.J. Dutton surmised. Jack Conway added, “I developed my image design and marketing skills. I also had a lot of opportunities to gain more experience with editing.”

But what about horror? Do I need to write horror? Do I need to be a horror expert?

Opinion on this one is mixed. Horrific Scribblings focuses on transgressive dark fiction, by which we mostly mean horror but also the horror-adjacent (dark scifi/fantasy, surreal/experimental, etc.). At the very least, you must be interested in reading horror of all types, including extreme/splatterpunk. You should be particularly aware that we receive extreme stories without trigger warnings, so you should be able and prepared to read such material. By “extreme horror,” I mean a type of horror most casual fans have not encountered: it often includes graphic and taboo depictions torture, mutilation, sex (consensual and non-consensual), cannibalism, and just about anything disgusting you can imagine along with things you can’t yet. If you are a sensitive reader, Horrific Scribblings may not be right for you.

Do you need to write horror? Technically, no, but experience writing horror likely means you have valuable insight into evaluating it.

Do you need to be a horror expert? No, you’re probably not, and that’s okay. My PhD focused on the history of Gothic/horror fiction–feel free to consult my CV–but I don’t know everything, especially about contemporary horror, so I appreciate Editorial Assistants who add to the knowledge pool, and knowledge improves analysis and evaluation. That said, on-the-job learning is possible as long as you’re receptive.

“I would recommend this internship primarily to budding horror writers and speculative fiction writers,” H.J. Dutton said. “I would not recommend the internship to people who want to gain industry experience BUT are not passionate about the horror genre. While the experience is invaluable, the lack of interest in the genre may skew their judgment when reviewing submissions.”

On the other hand, Jack Conway said, “Someone who isn’t passionate about writing or storytelling might have a hard time with this position. I would say that you don’t need to love the horror genre for this position, but you need to be open to reading a genre that you don’t normally read with an open mind, looking at it objectively.”

I’ll be frank and say that Conway didn’t have love for horror, but sometimes when we were talking about submissions, I felt like he could read my mind. At the same time, Dutton is right: if you can’t muster at least some interest in the material, you probably won’t be able to do it justice. Combine their perspectives: you must at least have interest and openness.

So, interested and open-minded people, email me (Andrew) at horrificscribblings@gmail.com! Maybe we’ll end up working together!

P.S. At least for the moment, Horrific Scribblings is not a money-making enterprise, so no one is making money from the labor of unpaid interns.

P.P.S. Quotations from Editorial Assistants are recontextualized from written interviews.