|| WATTYS 2021 SHORTLIST || Hindsight isn't always twenty-twenty. A head injury has left a critical gap in seventeen-year-old Allyson's memory, so she barely recognizes her little sister, Lindsay, who's grown sullen and antisocial. What happened to the silly and fun girl who used to call Allyson her best friend? The answer starts to take shape when Allyson unlocks an instant messaging app and delves into the archived conversations. The more she learns about the person she was before her accident, the more she wants to stop reading. She's ashamed of the way she treated Lindsay, but despite her efforts to reconcile, Lindsay remains distant. She seems to be harboring some terrible secret herself. Allyson needs help to solve the mystery, but she's afraid to challenge her parents' fragile pretense of normality. And Noah, the boy Allyson doesn't remember falling for the first time, is reluctant to dig up the past. Her only choice is to find the courage to meet her former BFF-a stranger who knows all the unsavory details. Allyson will have to own her lies and accept one heartbreaking truth if she's going to keep her family from falling apart. |Cover design by Phillip Hilliker: www.philhilliker.com. Illustration from postermywall.|

[Wattys 2022 Winner!] Vanessa Brooks, an anxious and cynical seventeen year-old, discovers she can travel to the summer of 1953 through the run-down community pool in her rural Michigan town and risks her future as she falls for a boy who lives in the past. ****** On the last day of junior year, Vanessa Brooks joins her friends for a traditional jump into the city pool to celebrate the beginning of summer and the last year they plan to spend in Palmer, Michigan; a dead-end riverside town with an eerily abandoned historic main street and decaying Victorian mansions. But when she resurfaces her classmates have been replaced by girls in retro swimsuits and bathing caps and guys in thigh-baring briefs with cigarettes tucked behind their ears. When Pete Harrison, an unfamiliar face who seems somewhat familiar with hers, offers a dizzy and confused Vanessa a towel and a ride home, she discovers her house and family missing. She has somehow slipped into 1953, the year her grandparents graduated high school. Using the pool and vivid imaginings of her grandfather's memories, Vanessa continues to escape to 1953- and to Pete, who, despite his unaffected kindness and optimism, has a mysterious bad reputation around town. But as she dives deeper into the summer her grandparents fell in love, she finds herself unable to return to the present without venturing even further into the past to correct a mistake that threatens her family and future. *Content Warning: this story contains scenes of near drowning and other perils on the sea, swearing, smoking and alcohol use* This story is complete at ~90,000 words. Wattys Winner 2022- Catchiest Hook and Wild Card Shortlisted Wattys 2021 Featured on @WattpadTimeTravel Featured on @WattpadHistoricalRomance Featured on @TeenFiction Editor's choice list, December 2022, May 2023 Cover by @eva3382

Thirteen-year-old Ginna's only connection to her long-dead mother is the dogwood in her backyard. The tree radiates a warm sort of buzz which might possibly be magic. Or is it a trick of her imagination? That's the agonizing question that earned her the label, "weirdo who talks to trees." And it's the reason Ginna is struggling with her plan to make one real friend. After an embarrassing attempt ends with Ginna kicking a soccer ball at a classmate's face, she retreats to the comfort of her tree-shaped companion to ask for help-and something strange happens. Ginna goes from mostly ignored to ridiculously popular overnight, and she's having conversations with someone or some thing inside her head. The source, an opinionated tree spirit named Dogwood, claims she accidentally stepped into Ginna's body. But now that the spirit has access to Ginna's thoughts and memories, she's in no hurry to go back where she belongs. Until Ginna figures out that Dogwood is hiding information about her mom. Now it's Ginna who doesn't want to let go. She has so many questions-but there's no time to wait for the stubborn spirit to answer. Ginna's body is becoming dangerously depleted and can no longer sustain Dogwood's energy. She'll have to find the courage to stand on her own before possession burnout destroys them both.

*A sequel to The Palmer Pool* Vanessa Brooks, now a high-school senior, hopes to put her time-traveling days behind her, until an opportunity arises to return the favor of a fellow time-traveler stuck in the past. ****** As Vanessa Brooks begins her senior year of high school, she hopes that the routine of life as usual will distract her from her memories of Pete, the boy she fell for and left behind in 1953. Now painfully aware of the risks of traveling to the past, she considers her time-traveling days over, even though she still longs to reunite with Pete. But with Eric Anderson, the only person who knows the truth about where Vanessa disappeared to all summer, keeping an uncomfortably close watch on her, along with her suspicious family and friends, she knows the only place she'll ever see Pete again is in her vivid dreams. When Vanessa accidentally travels from a 1920s themed Halloween party at a local historic mansion to an eerily similar party in the actual 1920s, she reconnects with a fellow time-traveler who needs her help. Vanessa discovers her ability to affect time is even stronger than she thought, and so is her determination to fight for what- and who- she wants. Cover by @JELyrica Content Warning: this story contains alcohol and drug use, and references to near-drowning events, panic attacks and drug overdose.

When seventeen-year-old Thea Allen's small-town private school is destroyed by a tornado, her mother seizes the opportunity to expose her to new experiences and new people. Translation: Mom wants to put hundreds of miles between Thea and her forever boyfriend, Glenn. Thea's inner math geek is tempted by the college level courses offered at the Upper East Side prep school. So, she's almost relieved when Glenn encourages the temporary move to New York City--until he breaks up with her, convinced she needs to date at least one other guy before she can be sure he's The One. Frustrated and reluctantly single, Thea begins her last year of high school at Oscar Zachary, where she discovers her life has developed some disturbing similarities to a certain children's novel. But Thea's "Oz" isn't entirely wonderful. Her Auntie Em is the Wicked Witch. The "heartless" boy next door keeps trying to hook up with her. And Thea is having a hard time ignoring an intense attraction to Conner, AKA The Scarecrow--a haphazardly hot boy, who may or may not even be available. Now the girl with the plan--the one who's always known what she wanted--is losing faith in her carefully plotted future. |Cover images from a photo by Michael Brodzik from Unsplash|