October 2025 Challenge
Power
This challenge is now closed. Thank you to those who submitted! If you missed this call, please add our next challenge to your calendar. It opens November 1.
The scariest monsters aren’t hiding under the bed. They’re the ones we made ourselves. Write about the monsters of our own making and how they haunt us today, whether that’s AI and tech, structural violence, climate collapse, or something just as insidious.
We are not looking for ghost stories or urban legends. Instead, send us writing that responds to what you doomscroll through. We’re seeking recipes for social justice, prose that explores the perils of smartphone addiction, poems about inflammatory rhetoric and the platforms they build, survival tips for the singularity, and more. Show us what “monsters of our own making” means to you.
We welcome all forms: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, hybrid, or something even genre goblins can’t categorize. If it’s urgent, sharp, and dripping with weird, we want to read it.
Send us your words that are as alive and unruly as the moment. Three winners will be selected and published at the end of November.
Prizes:
October 1, 2025
up to 1,000 words of prose / 2 pages of poetry
$10