[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 But when she resurfaces her classmates have been replaced by girls in retro swimsuits and bathing caps and guys in thigh-baring briefs with cigarettes tucked behind their ears.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

|||2021 WATTYS SHORTLIST||| Not everyone's high school experience involves hot romance, parties and big plans for the future. Some kids are shy. Some kids are socially awkward. Some kids have heavy burdens placed on them by their families or their religions. This is the tale of two of those kids. In her senior year, Sabrina Himmelschein feels like she has no privacy and no life of her own. She lives in one of San Francisco's iconic Postcard Row houses, in an Orthodox Jewish family with high standards and expectations. At a speech tournament she meets Neil Cannon, who lives up north among the vineyards of Sonoma County, where his parents happily work in the wine industry, despite being teetotaling Mormons. They form a bond, but reluctantly break it; the religious and cultural gulfs between them are too wide to bridge. Four years later, their dreams of changing the world reduced to retail jobs selling socks and cologne, they unexpectedly meet again. After the families and faiths they've depended on their whole lives have let them down in a dramatic way, Neil and Sabrina struggle with an important question: should they feel guilty about being happy to be back together?

Emily's life is a series of deliberate choices. The decision to study abroad this year is a final step towards the ambitious career she has always envisioned for herself. But even though all her friends and family doubted her chances of success spending months in India, where nothing will go as planned, Emily succeeds quite well in facing every challenge crossing her path... except avoiding that local guy who seems intent on throwing her off course from day one. When they realize they have more in common then they thought, they also discover that cultural differences are hard to overcome. Their love may be written in the stars, but will they stay loyal to their culture or each other? Based on real experiences, though the characters are fiction. #5 in studyabroad #6 in intercultural #11 in basedonreallife

Holiday tradition, whether it's decorating a tree altogether, singing carols by the fire at night, or visiting family, we all have one. This family's tradition is like the movie "Christmas Vacation" they go out of their way to find the perfect family tree and cut it down and take it home with them and decorate it. But what if that tree is on an Ancient Indian Burial Ground? The ground it stands on rumored to be cursed with the presence of Wendigo? Well, let's just say some tradition is never broken. No matter what the cost. (Author's note: This is a purposely campy-ish take on the #holidayhorror challenge on Wattpad Fright. You will notice the all time cliche of "Ancient Indian Burial Ground" is vibrant in this story, and it is purposely so. So, enjoy and let me know what you thought in the comments! Don't forget to vote, also. - JM)

What if . . . you could redo it all? The novella. #3 TimeTravel. If you could go back in time and redo one thing in your life, what would it be? Anaya, a disillusioned, thirty-five-year-old doctor, has been looking after Gregory, a retired watchmaker and resident of an aged care facility. On her last visit, he gifts her his final creation, an exquisitely-crafted watch, knowing she will die tragically that very day. It will turn back time. With one condition: she must choose the time and place to reset the clock, and redo just one thing in her life. Regrets, it seems, are easy to realise when you're dying. Hers was dropping out of school at seventeen. But what if, after one small change, her life would become much worse than it was? Or unthinkable disasters result from a single step off her path? When the alternative is die now, her choice makes itself. And so, Anaya's story begins with her last thought. Would I have done this if I had any option but the grave? Would you?

Miguel and his friends are just weeks away from graduating high school. Everyone is looking forward to graduation parties, summer break, and the start of college; but not Miguel. Miguel is undocumented and the President has just initiated the largest immigration crackdown in US history. Now he must navigate a world in which his very existence is treated with hostility by the country that he calls home.

Elfie Dia bought a new house, unconcerned about its history: it was cheap, and it would be hers. So when ghosts are threatening her peace of mind she does exactly what we all would. She refuses to leave, not caring who and why is haunting her. "You can burn this house down -- I'm just gonna put a mattress over its ashes and sleep on it!" A wild ride through a weird love story between an alcoholic woman and one of the ghosts who haunt her. #1 WINNER of the Paranormal Love -- Romantic Dreams 2020 Contest https://www.wattpad.com/story/212761963-romantic-dreams-2020-judging 1) Yes, there are multiple ghosts. 2) Yes, it's a comedy. Darkish. 3) Yes, it's a romance. Very pink. HEA. 4) Trigger warning: mental illness, addiction, and guns -- which could each get someone killed, but since it's a ghost story, here they combine and most definitely do. The main character is depressed and flippant about death, the tone pessimistic aka mentions of suicide, abusive behavior. Still a comedy, I swear. It's just how I write. 5) I know the plot in my head (I tell myself stories all the time) but this is written directly on Wattpad so I might go back to edit. I know where I'm going, but I appreciate any input that makes this project better, it's an exercise in writing episodical stories, my favorite kind. 6) Cover art from https://www.flaticon.com/authors/itim2101 edited by me.

When Myrtle Clover and her friend Miles attend a play in their small town, there's a full house on opening night. It's clear to Myrtle that one of the actresses is a stage hog who loves stealing the spotlight. Nandina Marshall certainly does upstage everyone-when her murder forces an unexpected intermission. Can Myrtle and Miles discover who was behind her final curtain call....before murder makes an encore?

When former youth pastor Dean Mitchell - who once oversaw the ex-gay program sponsored by his church - returns to his home church after being away for 2-years, no one is prepared for what he has to say. His heart is torn when he comes face to face with the young man he had fallen in love with while attempting to help him become healed of his homosexuality - and the young man is now engaged to a woman and, to all intents and appearances, free of his same-sex attraction. Now, Dean must deal with his own wounded heart as he struggles to come to terms with his feelings about the young man and his newfound happiness with a woman. Yet his heart continues to question: is the young man truly straight? Or is there more going on than meets the eye?