"Bridget Jones with a lot more wine! This story is hilarious, feel-good and relatable in all the best ways!" - Grace K @ HQ. She's just quit her high-flying job and her marriage is coasting on fumes. Can Alice find a sense of purpose in all the madness? ***** Alice's life isn't going to plan. She's tied to her phone, pointlessly managing PR for a sinking corporate megalith. She's become a bit player in her kids' lives and her marriage is coasting on fumes. Forcing herself into action with a rash resignation, Alice sets out to make a positive impact on the world around her. But how? Meditation leads to napping and her attempts to get closer to her teenage daughter result in the discovery of a secret that left her at loss of what to do! As the months tick by and a sense of purpose continues to elude her, Alice finds herself forming bonds with the most unlikely characters: the young woman who panhandles outside her old office; the homeless boy who sits cross-legged outside the liquor store with his ginger cat; her own dog walker who, it turns out, knows a thing or two about developing a good crema. Testing the limits of marriage, motherhood and the Toronto subway system--can Alice find her way into a purpose-driven life? Or will it all be one giant hangover? [*Wattpad Editor's Pick 2018*] [[word count: 70,000-80,000 words]] Readers say: "This had me laughing so loud that my sister came to check up on me to see if I'm OK!!!" "...the new Bridget Jones, a working woman's take on the digital age." About the Author: Working mother, annoying vegetarian and red wine enthusiast, Renee lives in Toronto with her flawed but wonderful family (seriously, who left socks on the kitchen counter?) in a flawed but wonderful house (what *is* that smell in the basement?).

WATTY 2016 WINNER of the HQ Love Award! With national focus on Islamic terrorism, few noticed when "Domestic Terrorist" Clayton Waagner was added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on September 21, 2001. How did a software developer become the 467th person added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List? Why did the FBI make Waagner a priority ten days after the worst terrorist attack in American history? How did he become the only person ever listed on the nation's top three Most Wanted List: FBI, U.S. Marshals, and ATF? Clay Waagner led an interesting life. He pranked a Soviet ship and caused a Cold War incident inside the Arctic Circle. He is a licensed pilot, an artist, a husband of 40 years and the father of nine. He worked for the Christian Broadcasting Network and skippered a commercial fishing boat out of Kodiak, Alaska. He has escaped from custody five times. Criminal Science major's and convicts know his name, but few in the public do. This is his story. "Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying." George Orwell By Orwell's standard this is an honest memoir. Clay Waagner 2016

Exciting news update - HAWK is in the very early stages of being adapted into an animated TV show! Please make sure to stick around and add this story to your shelves for upcoming announcements. Thanks so much for your support :) Kas Balera is used to a bit of chaos. As a space bounty hunter, capturing three Class-2 criminals should have been the most difficult part of her week, but when a disaster of epic proportions rocks the entire solar system, Kas is thrust into the midst of an adventure far beyond her wildest fantasies. With the help of a federal robot, a child genius, and her trusty ship - the Calista - Kas must use all her quick thinking and sharp wit if she's going to stay alive and uncover the new dark and dangerous mysteries of the galaxy. Pursued by evil X1 robots, bio-mech panthers and astral police officers, even Kas's kick-ass fight training and expert piloting can't seem to stop the entire galaxy from going after her. * Wattys Shortlisted * * Highest ranking: #1 in Science-fiction * Thanks to @CAPTAINSARCASTIC101 for helping with the blurb.

Blade Runner meets Orwell's 1984 in Mother's Hand. Set in a crumbling dystopian future, Earth is ruled by the all-seeing and unforgiving Mother. Kal dutifully donates his body to the military for four years while his consciousness is stored. He will wake up with no memories of the things his body has done in war. Six years later, Kal wakes screaming a name he doesn't know. As he tries to reconnect with his former life he soon realizes that Mother is not finished with him yet. As Kal fights to avoid capture he begins to peel back the lies that surround Mother's system and must discover the truth about his past before it's too late.

Winner of the Watty's 2017 Awards ✿ Destruction is a form of creation; buildings crumbled as he walked past. Khari Spence, trapped in a city steeped in hatred, longs to embrace his true self even if it means risking everything. He finds a fragile refuge in an old apartment with peeling wallpaper and blank journal pages -- and hopefully in a girl. Milo Locke, disillusioned with the hollow lure of materialism, seeks to rid the ideologies her parents forced onto her. When their worlds collide, will they help each other heal from past wounds, or will their secrets tear them apart?

*****WATTYS 2015 WINNER!***** WATTPAD STAFF PICK (9/7/15) In the end, the robots win. But you already knew that. "Everyone Died + My iPhone Stopped Working" is a collection of short interviews with some of the survivors. People who have tremendous insight into the rise of Artificially Intelligent machines or, more often, don't. Why did the robots rise up? What did they want? Why couldn't they be stopped? Can they be stopped now? Is humanity doomed? And what the f--k is going on with the squirrels? You will get the answers to all of these questions. Or some of these questions. Or none of these questions. We'll see. I will be updating this once a week until I run out of stuff that I find funny. Then I'm done. Cover art courtesy of the hilarious and ridiculously talented Dave Pressler. (http://www.davepresslerart.com)

We're trying something new. Well, trying two new things. We're starting to blog about Wattpad's journey into the world of microservices. And we're blogging on our own platform. We're proud of the really hard problems we have to solve every day and we'd love to show the solutions to the world. We also know that being candid and talking about our experiences (good and bad) in the public will benefit other engineering teams as well as ours. None of us is a blogger so it's difficult. But we're accustomed to overcoming difficult problems. The theme here will be our unique personal experiences along the way, ones you haven't heard elsewhere. Don't expect posts that debate monoliths vs. microservices or how to use Docker to do continuous deployment. Those are dead horses. We're frightened of dead horses so we don't want to go near them, let alone beat them. We'll be talking about our failures just as much as our successes. We're forging new paths in scaling a platform that allows millions of people to read and write. That means we have unique problems and we can't wait to talk about them. Our load balancers receive over 2 billion requests per day. Our traffic is constantly growing. We have a large monolithic PHP codebase. We decided about a year ago to start chipping away at that monolith to turn it into microservices. We have two microservices under our belts now so we'll recount what it took to create them and what the hard parts were and going forward we'll post current projects, as we're working on them. We just started working on perhaps our most important microservice, the Text Service. This service will be responsible for all storage and retrieval of text. Pretty key for a reading and writing platform. Oh yeah, we're not just creating microservices, we're writing them in Go and loving it so expect to hear all about that too.

What if everything you knew about yourself was a lie? Mildred "Mills" Millhatten had a good life: close-knit family, fantastic friends, decent grades and even a not-totally-annoying kid brother. You might say it was the best kind of ordinary. So nothing could have prepared her for being taken and cast into a strange, vicious world that she didn't know existed and has little hope of understanding. As a Bleeder - one whose lifeblood feeds the Nosferatu - her continued survival hangs ever in the balance. The creatures are keeping her alive because they believe her blood has mystical properties. Mills fears what will happen when they realize they are wrong. If she hopes to survive and discover who she truly is, she needs an ally. She needs to befriend the mysterious boy who's been secretly visiting her cell, even though he's destined to become a bloodthirsty monster. Because she lives in their world now, and if she doesn't do something fast, she's going to die in it too.

Margaret Atwood's first graphic novel, Angel Catbird, tells the story of a hybrid human-cat-owl, Angel Catbird, and his peculiar identity conflict. Should he save that baby robin, or should he eat it? Read a synopsis of Angel Catbird Volume 1 and take a look at the excerpts posted here. Then write a new caption and/or dialog for the illustration and post it to this page, and you could be a winner! Four chances to WIN!