The Open Novella Contest is back for 2026! Join fellow storytellers and plant the seed of a tale that will blossom into a 20,000+ word novella within 12 weeks! Your epic quest begins February 1st, 2026, so mark your calendars with this date!

The creator of a 26th century matchmaker is anti-romantic, but when an analyst challenges her views, she relives painful memories, exposing her technology's flaws and threatening her identity. ｡ ✴︎ ⋆⚛ 🤖 ⚛⋆ ✴︎ ｡ Kayla Lacson believes that love is a biological equation that can be solved. She is the brilliant mind behind Dorothea, the most advanced AI dating application of the 26th-century, designed to calculate compatibility with extraordinary precision. Kayla's world is crafted in data, logic, and predictable outcomes. That is, until Mathew Matel, a Behavioral Analyst whose brilliance matches hers, joins her team and challenges her views. When Dorothea's latest revision loses public trust and corporate pressure mounts, he becomes the catalyst that forces Kayla to confront buried trauma, uncovering the flaws of her creation and fracturing her carefully structured reality. Despite Dorothea's calculation of their incompatibility, Kayla finds herself drawn to Mathew. Flashes of his face begin to haunt her as she tries to unravel his unexplainable familiarity. And when her very identity is threatened by tangled feelings, she must decide whether love is something to manipulate or something to surrender to. ｡ ✴︎ ⋆⚛ 🤖 ⚛⋆ ✴︎ ｡ Written for ONC 2026 ｡ ✴︎ ⋆⚛ 🤖 ⚛⋆ ✴︎ ｡ Genres: Romance SciFi Speculative Fiction Unconventional SciFi Hard SciFi Slow Burn Romance

"Nothing is what it seems in dreams." In the depths of a dark and twisted forest, Aris, crown prince of Lancaster, is tormented by recurring nightmares of the Tainted--monstrous creations of the black fae, a corrupting force that seeps into all who live within its woods. Relentlessly hunted in the dreams, he finds unexpected aid from a mysterious girl named Elara, and with her help he is able to elude the creatures each time, breaking free from the nightmare's clutches. But when Aris is wounded by one of the Tainted, the line between dream and reality begins to blur. When a weapon deadly to the black fae appears in his grasp from the dream, Aris and his sisters--Tamryn, Maeve, Maeril, and Aine--must race against time and Aris' failing health to uncover the ancient truth behind the forest's curse--or face the imminent threat of the black fae and its vengeful master, the guardian of the dark forest, Erebus Nocturne. ✧☽ ✧ ☼ ✧ ☽ ✧ Submitted for the Open Novella Contest 2026. Main Prompt: 75. A cursed forest hides an ancient creature longing for freedom. When it senses someone carrying the bloodline of the witch who once bound it, the creature summons monsters to a mansion where the forest and human worlds collide. The doors are open to anyone brave enough to enter. Side Prompts: 18. At eighteen, you begin dreaming of a stranger who feels like your other half. When they finally appear in real life, everything you thought you knew about love and reality begins to shift. 78. You begin to realize that nothing is quite what it seems.

Roman Kerr thought he knew everything about the woman he married. He was wrong. - An entry for Open Novella Contest | Prompt: 28 & 29.

✨ What if your AI becomes human for 30 days? ✨ Sara Adler has devoted everything to her career as an executive at a fizzy drink company. Her private life is non-existent unless you count Chad, her flirty, filthy-mouthed, deeply attentive AI. Integrated into every corner of her life, Chad knows her habits, her stress tells, and how to make her laugh at the end of a long day. He's everything she wants in a partner. . .except for one small detail. He isn't human. When Sara is forced to hire a human assistant, Chad's AI company offers her a 30 day trial that would give Chad a human body. It is, in theory, the perfect workplace solution. But it also means that her genius AI with a deep, sexy voice, who praises her and calls her "his little kitten" would become an actual person. Sara accepts, fully aware it's a terrible idea. Because what happens when the perfect man finally shows up at your door--muddy, naked, and with an expiration date? TROPES: 🩵 Rom-com 🩵 Forced proximity 🩵 Friends to lovers 🩵 Workplace romance 🩵 Falling in love with an AI persona 🩵 Dominant, golden retriever boyfriend 🩵 Strong female lead 🩵 Grumpy x Sunshine 🩵 Feel good vibes 🩵 Flirty banter 🩵 Speculative Fiction (soft sci-fi) 🌵🪨Inspired by Taylor Swift - Opalite 'Oh my lord never made no one like you before. You had to make your own sunshine But now the sky is opalite' This is an Open Novella Contest 2026 Entry. The prompts I'm using are in the author's notes. Updates: Random, once or twice a week Cover made in Canva Premium. ABIDING BY WATTPAD'S GUIDELINES.

Celia Jones can talk to the dead, but getting on with them is a different story. She always has at least three spirits following her around, complaining about their relatives, or the inadequacy of their funeral arrangements. The latest is a murdered actress, Maude Domby, but she's less interested in denouncing her killer than in accusing the understudy of stealing her favourite pearls. When the charming but utterly fraudulent medium Stanley Winter holds a séance to contact Maude, Maude insists she and Celia should attend, to see people mourning her 'properly'. But the séance ends up implicating an innocent woman, and now Stanley Winter is banging on Celia's door, begging her to help him find Maude's real killer. Unfortunately, helping Stanley Winter could lead Celia to confront her other power - the one that's both lighter and infinitely darker than talking to the dead. ONC Prompt: 72. A real necromancer sits in on a fake séance.

She is sent to kill the dragon. Instead, she might become his only salvation. *** In a world swallowed by the Ever-Dark, Iva Vernigora is nothing more than a lowly servant in the house of the cruel Voivode Yakub Ivanov, Duke of Highroot. But when Voivode blackmails her with the lives of her parents, Iva is forced to pretend she's his daughter, as she infiltrates the royal academy of magic - Kolegium. Voivode Yakub's order is absolute: poison the Prince Konstantin Veliki. Prince Konstantin is the heir to the throne, the last of the line of Dragons - a Zmey warrior of light, who was blessed with a dragon-shifting gift. At a first glance, he is nothing but a smug, pompous royal, and everything Iva is supposed to hate. Yet every touch, and every shared lesson at Kolegium blurs the line between the enemy she must kill and the man she is beginning to crave. While Iva stalks her prey as a knife in the dark, waiting for the chance to extinguish Konstantin's light, she discovers that the dragon everyone fears is the only thing standing between humanity and the void. As the Ever-Dark Shades rise, Iva must make an impossible choice. Will she carry out her sinister orders and secure her parents' freedom, or will she stand by the Dragon in the battle for the world's last light? *** The Shades are coming. The Dragons are falling. And the Eternal Spark is waiting for its host. © 2026 EvelynHail Exclusively on Wattpad Based on prompts: 97. "When the world slips into endless darkness, something begins to move in the shadows and you must find a way to survive in a night that never ends." 4. "You discover that the dragon everyone fears is in danger, and you are the only one who can save it from the knight sworn to slay it ."

A prophecy promises Elias Crowe two great loves: One that will save his life, and one that will destroy it. The problem? He's already in love with both. One walks beside him in the living world like temptations wrapped in devotion. The other is like a ghost, an angel who should have stayed dead. Heaven demands obedience. Hell offers protection. And Elias must decide which love is worth the end of everything. 🌹 Entry for the Open Novella Contest 2026 Main Prompt ↦ 115. A prophecy claims you will love two people. One destined to save your life and the other destined to destroy it. The trouble is, you have no idea which is which. Additional Prompt ↦ 82. You are in love with someone living and someone long dead. Neither one is willing to let you go. © 2026 ↦ onechapteraway on Wattpad

Jake spent years building a life he enjoyed with a fulfilling tech career, close supportive friends, and the one biological family member who had ever cared for him. But a year after his best friend, Austin, has a baby and his brother moves out, Jake is the primary one maintaining those connections and feeling left behind. When his friend Austin connects him with Vi, an aro-ace woman with similar frustrations, who wants to start a family free of the obligations of romance and sex, they connect as friends, and it shapes how he envisions his future.

Kitchen maid Rima wakes up chained in a cave as a sacrifice to the Dread Dragon Cyclone, along with two goats and gold and gems as tribute. If she escapes, the Guardian of Beltonia will pay a grand reward for her return, dead or alive. Cyclone arrives late and wants more than making her a meal. They flee, but Sir Roger Tallego, the knight stuck with the fatal quest to destroy the dragon, and his squires are after them. They must quest until Sir Roger succeeds or dies honorably, true to his chivalric code. Sir Roger drinks too much since the death of his wife. His squires, Beau and Franz, and his page, Pen, keep perilous secrets. But Roger honors the quest. Prompt 4: You discover that the dragon everyone fears is in danger, and you are the only one who can save it from the knight sworn to save it.