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. ｡ ✴︎ ⋆⚛ 🤖 ⚛⋆ ✴︎ ｡ ONC 2026 Round 1 Winner and Ambassador Pick Round 2 Winner and Ambassador Pick ｡ ✴︎ ⋆⚛ 🤖 ⚛⋆ ✴︎ ｡ Genres: Romance SciFi Speculative Fiction Unconventional SciFi Hard SciFi Slow Burn Romance

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

When a strange message popped up on Iris's phone, she didn't expect a link to a game that would change her life forever. Trapped in a neon-lit world with no exit button, she finds herself surrounded by other players, people she has never met before, all of whom seem just as lonely and lost as she is. But this game isn't like any other she's played before. There is no score, and there are no winners. Instead, the system gives them quiet, deeply personal quests that force them to talk, trust, and confront the things they've been running from. The more they open up, the closer they get to logging out, because the game's true purpose was never for entertainment, but to save them. The only problem was that Iris had already made up her mind about being alive. Prompt: 60. You download a new app that promises to cure your boredom, and it delivers far more than you ever expected.

**ONC2026 Round 2 Ambassador Pick** Vincent is having an amazing morning. The most popular guy in the office has given him a high-five, a pretty girl has offered him a coffee, and he's been invited to join the frisbee team. It's almost like they've confused him with someone else. Someone popular. Someone fun. Someone about to bring Vincent's life to a shuddering halt. My entry for ONC2026 based on this writing prompt: 77. Everyone in town remembers you differently, as if everyone has lived a different version of your life. Cover design by @elicatucci

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.

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.

"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.

✨ What if your AI became 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' Updates: Random, once or twice a week Cover made in Canva Premium. ABIDING BY WATTPAD'S GUIDELINES.

Time and tide bring to light all that is hidden. Hurleva is a foundling raised by the Order of the Sealord, named for the shipwreck that nearly claimed her life. She knows nothing of her origins. But time and tide are conspiring to change everything. The land is failing, the sea is giving up its secrets, and Leva sees and hears what should not be possible. Dedicated to those who have lost, or are still fighting to save their homes on the East Anglian coast.