We want to hear your story! We are challenging your scribbles to try to lower our editor's defenses and come inside us.

What happened to you?

We don’t know, but we’d sure like to find out. We have a section for this confessional style called It Happened To Me and it’s one of our favorite parts of this site.

Do you have anything you’d love to share with a large audience? Maybe it’s a dark, embarrassing secret about how you’ve been cheating on your husband with the lawnmower. Perhaps you need advice about a cult leader boss making you do morning group exercise to 90s techno beats.

No matter the case, we’ll read your submissions and you may be featured on AFRU. Here are some examples of stories we love to read:

• Write about a specific relationship and how it’s changed you, or what you’ve learned from it, or unusual thoughts you have about it. Like I love him dearly, but I want to experience hookup culture, there must be something interesting or odd about your story. Everyone has experienced the sads.
• Or what about plugging in the blender and generating surprising intersections of topics we wouldn’t normally expect going together — like we did with hairstyle/politics for The artsy, anti-Republican case for microbangs.
• Maybe stories about your night out and your encounters with douchebags or douchebaguettes. Or your eccentric views on tipping, or the weird thing that happened in the bathroom …
• Did you discover a new way to experience an experience? A fresh take on tourism? Do you have a sexuality nobody’s ever heard of and that needs to be normalized?
• We do love beauty and fashion tips, but our style for these posts is to have a little more meat on the bone than other blogs. The internet is full of trashy articles in this genre because they have so much commercial potential. Tread with caution.
• Everybody loves weeeeird how-to’s.
• You could spill your intimate secrets to keeping an X relationship going strong in Y circumstance. Is it the way you smoke his bacon or the way he tosses your salad? Tell us! We like to maintain a rich diet of topics, with occasional hanky panky. It’s in our core values.
• For the brave: embarrass the people in your life, past or present, with stories they wish would never see the light of day.
• You could write an entirely original take on tech or science like Are AIs sexual beings? We sexually harassed one for hours to find out.
• For the even braver: painstakingly document every moment of your most embarrassing sex adventure.
• Have you discovered genius new parenting techniques? Parents around the world need to hear from you, ASAP!
• Strong opinions? Cutting edge social commentary from the cold outer reaches of polite society? Yes, please, we’ll take that.

There are plenty of possibilities, and it all starts with writing words into your notes, and then emailing it to [email protected]. Or if you aren’t so sure about this writing thing, just email the basic premise or title and we’ll tell you if it sounds like a good post.

Writer guidelines

TLDR; minimum 800 words, and have a reasonably logical flow of ideas so the editor doesn’t have to play puzzle with your paragraphs. Please don’t email just to ask questions that are already answered in our guidelines. It’s not a long read!

1. Your piece must be unique (not previously published elsewhere), and of a high enough standard that we don’t have to spend half a day editing and rewriting your work.
2. Minimum 800 words, with no sign of useless filler language.
3. No bland junk already covered to death elsewhere. No wikipedia-style “beginner intros” to something unless it’s a totally rad new trend. We expect our writers to be able to express something interesting. You can write about something everyone else already talks about if you approach it in a new way.
4. Do some very basic editing of your own to make sure that you don’t needlessly jump back and forth in time to ideas you’ve already expressed. Pieces with poor logical continuity are a nightmare for editors because moving blocks of text around like a jigsaw puzzle also requires severe rewrites to make them fit.
5. Feel free to link external sites (appropriately – and source your claims), but we like credible and authoritative sites and don’t like overly commercial sites.
6. Absolutely no AI junk or third world “content mill” articles. These are never accepted and your email will be blocked.
7. We prefer to be pitched first (send the story idea) but if you’ve already written something up, we’re happy to consider it.

With that said, you can work the way you prefer. Docx, text files, Google Docs – it’s all good with us! The editor will source any media or images needed, so don’t worry about that.

PS.: Please make sure to let us know if you’d like to remain anonymous or write under a special pseudonym — or have any other conditions. We’re probably cool with it, within reason. If you’d like to have an author box with a bio description and your social links, make sure to include all of that as well. We’re happy to promote our writers and their stuff!

So is your braincase bubbling over with awesome ideas yet? Waiting patiently for you at [email protected].