Every family has its secrets. Unfortunately for Harlequin Jones, everyone knew her family's nasty little secret. For eight years, Harlequin and her mother had tried to forget the truth and bury the horrors of their past, but when Harlequin's grandmother begs for her to come and stay, the truth refuses to stay dead. Returning to the home of her grandparents brings back many happy childhood memories for the thirteen-year old Harlequin; memories of home-made apple pie, playing pretend-horses in the yard and fishing down at Bitter Creek. But the visit brings back something else, something Harlequin thought had ended eight years before and she is about to learn that her family's nasty little secret is far worse than she could ever have imagined. Blood is thicker than water and family is everything. There's no place like home.......

Henry's grumpy. Isaac's lonely. And then Isaac rings the cereal helpline Henry works at, and things get a lot more complicated. [short story - #48, 1st october 2014] [teen fiction - #226, 1st october 2014] PLEASE NOTE: this story is currently being converted from all lower case to sentence case. this might take some time.

A seventeen year old boy named Jacob meets his (potentially insane) birth father for the first time, and goes with him on a road trip to dig up Nazi war paintings, hoping for a quick million. Or billion. Whatever works. A story about loving the ones who raised you and forgiving the ones who didn't.

The city was going wild. People--including Harley--were huddled around TVs in shop windows. There were two news anchors sitting at their desk, talking about how a crazed man went and bit and killed someone in Europe. And then how it started to spread. But as he was speaking, Harley looked over to the woman on the screen. She had clawmarks all over her unusually pale skin and her breathing was unsteady and rapid. Almost. . . desperate. But then the screen blackened. The city had never been calm, but as the mysterious illness started to spread here, the military came, shooting anyone in sight. Undead or alive, it didn't matter. To them, one less person alive was one less potential walking corpse. Harley was hiding behind the dumpster, facing her makeshift tent that she had called her home for about a year. All she could hear behind her was screaming, crying, and gunshots. °•°•°•° Mature content: gore and strong language

|| Nicholas is a boy who really loves films; Lynn is a girl who really doesn't. || Lynn has to spend the summer back in her old town, and with Lydia's help she does so surrounded with movies and film festivals and the like. © celeste g. 2014. °°°[ ALSO A WORK IN PROGRESS] °°°

Every teenager is an addict. Whether they're addicted to shopping, texting, sleeping, playing video games or simply just hanging out with their friends, every teen has that one thing that they can't get enough of. Elsa King was no exception. She would stay up all night chatting away with her new found friends across the pond, watching funny videos on Youtube and fangirling about celebrities in chatrooms. Nothing could keep her away from her laptop. Well, almost nothing. [Extended summary inside] © All Rights Reserved Artemis Holmes 2014. #breakstereotypes Top Ratings - Short Story: #66 Teen Fiction: #321

"Not just a flavour, but a way of life." When seventeen-year-old Flo Kennedy is forced to up sticks and trade her life in London for a sleepy seaside town on the south coast, she's anything but excited. Walden-on-Sea could win awards for being Britain's dullest town, and with a population consisting almost entirely of over sixties, teenagers are an endangered species. Silently struggling with her parents' death and separation from her sister, Flo's convinced she's in for the worst summer of her life. But when she meets the guy in the ice cream shop, things start to change. It's not long before she lands herself a job, a new set of friends and maybe even the beginnings of first romance. For the first time in several years, she's happy. But Flo knows all too well that things can't stay perfect forever, and after all, being on top of the world only gives you further to fall.

‘Cause Grim really isn’t that bad of a guy; he just has a terrible rep. {Correspondence between the Bringer of Death and a girl, not by the means of letters – because let’s face it, nobody has time for them anymore.} (© vanities 2013)

"You know what stood out to me when I first met you?" He asked me. I shook my head. "Most people who walk in here, I can guess where they'll go. Which genre, I mean. But you, you surprised me." "Why?" I asked. "Because you." He said. "You walked in here with a Fall Out Boy shirt on, and went straight for the classical section."