My Scareuary 2024, Entry #11: My Experience

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 is write something, no matter how short or how long, and complete it in the month of January. I think that's about as easy as it gets when it comes to writing challenges.

 

For my own stories, I ended up writing four short stories, two of which ranged from 2.5-3k words, and two of which ranged from 600-700 words. The four stories I wrote were:

• The Star Seal
• A New Spring
• RRZ Mujannah
• From a Star in the Ocean

I'm really happy that I was able to complete the challenge. I think that one of the best things about participating in Scareuary for me was the fact that I coincidentally found a whole bunch of horror lit mags that had their submissions open with deadlines in January or February! This motivated me even more; I wanted to write these short stories with the hope that I might be able to submit one of them to these lit mags and (possibly, hopefully) get published!

I think I'll definitely tackle this challenge again next year. Will I do the Coppe's Webbe specifically? I'm not entirely certain. While I really enjoyed doing it, I have to admit that it is a little more time consuming than the other challenges would have been, and I almost didn't complete it. I suppose it'll depend on what I've got on the stove next January. 

I hope more people will participate in the future iterations of Scareuary. I already have the challenges for 2025 picked out, the post written and scheduled, and this time around, I'm going to be advertising it very, very early on - from October onwards! I'm hoping this will help more people get ready for it and allow them to make space for it in their minds and in their schedules.