Submissions Challenge!
Do you want to improve your chance of acceptance? If your work is accepted, do you want it (and you along with it) to receive special promotion and be part of an exclusive, themed Exhibit? Do you want to show off your awesome, versatile talent?
Respond to a Horrific Scribes Submissions Challenge!
We’re always open to general submissions of the sorts described in the main submission guidelines, but we’re also usually on the hunt for something in particular.
Stories submitted for our next Challenge (open as of April 1, 2026) should be “nature horror” (which encompasses but goes beyond our existing plant/fungal horror category). By “nature horror” we mean stories (or perhaps poems) that focus on horrific developments from the non-human part of the natural world. We want stories that emphasize provocative, scary, and strange aspects of the ugly, icky side of nature. Send us your creepy crawlies, weeds, worms, grubs, slugs, mosses, mushrooms, molds, lichens, and other natural things that throb and ooze and squirm. Show us forests cloaked in kudzu and corpses crusted in fungus. Send us pulsing maggots and beetles gnawing the gristle off of bones. Body horror is more than welcome, but we need unconventional, unfamiliar interactions between icky nature and the human body. Mixing nature with the weird, fantastic, or supernatural is fine, but the primary ick must be rooted in the natural world. And we’ve got one more twist for you: to qualify, your story’s primary horrific imagery MUST appear DURING THE DAY. Light it up. We want to see this ugliness clearly!
Submit stories no later than midnight U.S. Pacific Time May 15.
We will avoid stories about:
- Spiders
- Crows/Ravens
- Rats
- Domestic cats and dogs
While we won’t reject stories about carnivorous plants or parasitic fungi, submissions in these categories must be exceptional.
Other than focusing on nature, meeting the “ugly/icky” criterion, and putting the natural horror in the day, submissions for the Challenge should follow all the regular submission guidelines, including the final step of submitting via this Google form: https://forms.gle/nrqoWsY1iY3dZphq8