Opennovellacontest Stories

**WATTYS 2025 HONOURABLE MENTION** Cas and Vish are best friends whose feelings run deep. Whilst Cas is clever, sporty, and on the brink of a bright future at university, Vish has no such prospects. A painfully shy artist, Vish's horizons end at his daily routine of pills, sensory issues and panicking parents. When they celebrate what could be their final summer together by painting wildlife and swimming at a secret wooded wetland hidden in the Fens, the lads awaken something ancient and sinister lurking in the water. A voice in Vish's head -- Charlie -- tempts him to spend longer and longer in the woods. When villagers begin to disappear and Vish becomes increasingly secretive and distant, Cas is convinced that Charlie intends to claim Vish, body and soul. Lies, heartbreak and obsession push their friendship to breaking point, but nothing will stop Cas from protecting Vish from Charlie's onslaught, not even a fight to the death. --- This book started life as an ONC 2025 prompt: 105. Your childhood imaginary friend who disappeared years ago returns - only this time they're real.

For Centuries Grim has been collecting souls. It's what he does, it's his purpose. One day, while collecting a soul in the park, he comes across a lost puppy. For reasons he can't explain, the urge to return the small dog to his owner is overwhelming. He soon finds the animal's owner, a woman in her mid-twenties named Maria. He is struck down by her beauty and realizes that he had once claimed the soul of someone she loved. He becomes even more conflicted when he realizes he has just one year to claim her soul.

This space is created especially for writers participating in the Open Novella Contest 2026 Writing a novella is exciting... but also confusing, lonely, and full of self-doubt. ❤️ Is my story good enough? ❤️Is my opening strong? ❤️Will readers understand my characters? ❤️Am I even on the right track? You don't have to figure this out alone. This book club is a place where contestants can: ✔ Share their entries ✔ Get genuine reads ✔ Receive honest and helpful feedback ✔ Improve their chapters ✔ Support fellow writers Here, we don't compete. We grow together. If you are writing for the Open Novella Contest and want readers, reviews, and real feedback - this circle is for you. Let's help each other write better stories.

HE JUST DOESN'T KNOW WHEN TO STOP After falling asleep to a video of the "nihilist penguin", Lian Min wakes at 3 a.m. to wet footprints and melting snow in his studio apartment in a country of perennial summer. On tracing the footprints to the corridor, he discovers a world in stasis where he is the only one who can still move. That's the least of his worries, however. Various flowers begin sprouting in his living room and the footprints change trails without warning, leading him to discover things about his neighbourhood that he never knew and perhaps should not know. Then the trail goes cold.

Prompt 78 - You begin to realize nothing is quite what it seems.

The quiet kid has spent years sitting next to the school's biggest troublemaker and bully, wishing he could just disappear.When a desperate wish flips their lives in the strangest way possible, both must navigate the other's worlds and understand each other's problems

ALIEN AMONG US is a contemporary sci-fi novella that will give you the giggles, tug at your heartstrings, and leave you wondering if there really is life beyond the stars. ************************************************************************ Entered into the Open Novella Contest 2026 | @OpenNovellaContest - Rules & Guidelines: here: https://www.wattpad.com/story/406004197-open-novella-contest-2026 **Main Prompt** 25. You live with four other housemates, but one of them is secretly an alien trying to learn how to act human. ©2026 E. S. Elias, All Rights Reserved. Book Created & Published to Wattpad: 02.01.2026 Book Marked as Completed: 00.00.2026 Book Cover: Me @DesignsbyEH Word Count: 2,222 / 20,000 Goals: ✔ Round 1 ✔ | 2,000 words ✔ | Round 2 _ | 8,000 words ✔ Round 3 _ | 20,000 words LONGLIST _ | SHORTLIST _ Round Winner? _ | Honorable Mention? _ | Ambassadors' Pick? _ Mentioned in Ambassador Newsletter _ Top-5 Winner? _ Rankings: #ONC2026: #ONC #2 02.03.2026

Evelyn Stone lives inside a life that looks complete from the outside-married, settled, raising a healthy son in a house filled with routine and expectations. But beneath the checked boxes and Sunday smiles, her marriage has become a place where love is measured in logistics rather than attention, and worth is defined by usefulness instead of connection. Lucas is not unkind; he is simply finished-content with a version of Evie that no longer includes her dreams, her hunger, or her becoming. As Evie navigates motherhood in a body marked by survival and a spirit quietly starving to be seen, she begins to question what it means to matter in a life that has already decided she should be satisfied.

When a cautious Formula One engineer crosses paths with a damaged comeback driver, she discovers that the most dangerous variable she should assess in the sport isn't speed-but attachment. ✦✦✦ Adriana Santos has always known her place on a championship-winning Formula One team is contingent. Excellence, she learned early, is not the same as security. She works in a role the paddock barely understands-simulating failures before they happen, answering 'what ifs' before they become 'what went wrong', and treating the car like a living thing whose future rests in her hands. Her work is quiet, precise, and easily erased the moment she becomes inconvenient. She is careful because she has to be. She knows Joshua Thomas long before she meets him: the driver who changed his name to fit in, the anomaly on a rival team forever tipped for titles. To Adriana, he's a reaction curve that never quite returned to baseline after last season's crash. His comeback is framed as resilience. Many are simply waiting to see him fail. They meet by accident, in a moment stripped of his usual extravagance and pretence. Adriana notices what she always notices-the face behind the mask, the way he laughs through failure like it doesn't frighten him. Adriana doesn't forget him, though. She keeps her distance but Joshua doesn't, and their reluctant friendship begins to bend into something riskier. And they both know exactly what it could cost them. ✦✦✦ ✦ Open Novella Contest 2026 | Prompts 24, 29, 30, 44 ᴄᴏᴘʏʀɪɢʜᴛ © 2026 ʙʏ ᴀᴜᴅʀᴇʏ ᴀʟʟ ʀɪɢʜᴛꜱ ʀᴇꜱᴇʀᴠᴇᴅ.

🏆 ONC 2026 Rounds 1 & 2 Qualifier 🏆 ONC 2026 Round 2 Winner 🏆 🏆 ONC 2026 Round 2 Ambassadors Pick 🏆 Where magic intersects with life, Ren is an unwilling planter whose magnificent garden is full of his failures. When his attempt at confessing to his crush leads to the sight of an unexpected guest hidden in the flowers he was going to give, Ren is tugged along on a fantastical quest to an odd little village that only exists on rainy days to not just break the curse of the finger-sized prince who's deemed Ren his friend, but to also break free from Ren's own wretched connection to mistakes. Along the way, he may just come to realize the power of not just unbridled love, but also love for oneself and just how beautifully it can blossom into something worth saving. Amidst secrets, ticking time, tall tales with hints of truth, and a forest worth dying in, perhaps this time around, Ren won't add to his flowers of failures. Not if he can help it. Love can bloom, too, after all, right?

Als monsters mensen nodig hebben, maar mensen monsters niet... welke soort is dan werkelijk krachtig? En wat gebeurt er als de mensheid dat eindelijk realiseert? De strateeg Hugo ontmoet Merille. Zij is niet menselijk, dus staan ze recht tegenover elkaar. Maar Merille is anders dan elk monster dat hij kent. Zij heeft zijn soort niet nodig. Het antwoord is controle. Maar hoe kan hij dat krijgen, terwijl de regels zijn veranderd? Het is tijd om het systeem te controleren, voordat hij wordt gecontroleerd. * Volgens prompt 80. Monsters leven niet onder onze bedden. Ze leven in de krochten van onze gedachten.

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

2100. A mysterious ship, nicknamed the Chimera, appears in Martian airspace. It bears the symbol of the international space agency, the BASE, but there is no record of such a vessel. Word and rumour quickly spread. BASE investigator Leanne Ziegler is sent to inspect the ship and make contact with its crew. But the Chimera seems completely deserted, other than the imperious AI caretaker, Valkyrie. Down in the fledging Nerio colony on Mars, suspicion grows. The colonists are already turning against the ways of the BASE, creating their own Martian identity. This potential security threat could prove to be the final rift between Earth and Mars. Trying to keep control of the political situation, Nerio sends a mysterious and cold liaison, Ryan, to aid Leanne. But, in ten days, Mars will turn her guns on the Chimera. Leanne and Ryan must work quickly to discover the secret of the ship - and decide whether its fate under the Martian guns is deserved. [ONC 2024 entry]

Everyone fears the ancient creature trapped in the forbidden forest. That's why the knights have come to kill it. Maera Solene Wyld has never been what her coven wanted her to be; she was too volatile, too angry, too weak to carry her mother's legacy as the most powerful witch alive. Her magic fractures instead of obeying, her temper burns hotter than her spells, and for almost ten years, Maera's nights have been haunted by dreams of a stranger who feels like the missing half of her soul- when dreaming itself should be impossible. When knights march into the cursed woods close to her coven's Sanctum, Maera begins to suspect the creature they hunt is tied to the strange dreams and warnings that have followed her for years; connections she doesn't yet understand- and saving it means turning against everything she was taught to fear: monsters, fate, and even herself. Hunted by her kingdom, betrayed by prophecy, and driven by a rage she can barely control, Maera must choose whether she is a failure of her bloodline... or something far more dangerous.

Rich beyond imagination, engaged to his old childhood friend, kind and humble, Vincent Nero was Manhattan's golden boy. Until his disappearance left the whole of New York talking. Where did he go? Is his unusual behavior connected to his disappearance? Is he even still alive? The truth is much bigger than his friends and reporters could imagine. Because while they muse about his fate, Vincent is fighting his way through the Underworld in a quest few have ever survived from. Who set him on this path? And will he manage to reach the end alive?

A young girl tries to escapes the confines of her uneventful life to lose herself in the wild with a few much deserved friends -- and perhaps find something much more meaningful along with it. She finds fleeting freedom hand in hand with perilous times, but she finally discovers that love wins against all, in a heartwarming and heartbreaking moment. And was it all a dream? Does it really matter, even if it was a dream? She carries her lessons and love with here, until the day she dies. Prompts: »And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.« (Quote by John Muir) Self-love often starts small, like planting a single seed. With time, patience, and a bit of light, it will blossom.

Blurb Milo is a vampire new to the mythical community. His father has enrolled him in the mythical boarding school, Mareville Academy. Milo has a big secret-he's not like other vampires. He tries to fit in, but ends up causing trouble. Will Milo be able to stay out of trouble and represent his kind in a just way? # Story is completed (not edited yet). #All places and people are fictional. #An 'Open Novella Contest 2026' entry. #Prompt 81. Unalluring and bumbling, your character is the world's worst vampire. #This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

For her it was love at first sight, for him we couldn't be so sure. I saw his handsome face wow what I thought in my mind, God really spend a lot of time in creating him or his parents had the perfect figure l, he is over 6ft and those broad shoulders... OMG I couldn't help but stare with his beautiful voice, the only thing that spoilt his perfect figure was his bad behavior, I don't know why handsome guys are always arrogant, besides it is not as if I'm in love with him, or was I. It couldn't be I said to myself

The dream always ended the same way: with the salt-spray of an ocean I'd never visited and the warmth of a hand I couldn't quite grasp. He never had a face-just a silhouette cut out of the moonlight-but his voice was a low rumble that vibrated in my chest. "Find me," he'd whisper. "Before the clocks stop." When I woke up, the silence of my apartment felt like a physical weight. I checked my pulse, my skin still buzzing from a touch that didn't exist. I told myself it was just stress. I told myself that "Thorne" was a name I'd probably seen on a billboard or a dusty law book. But then I saw him.

A dark family lineage. Secrets hidden away within rotting walls. And a mysterious Book that binds it all together... Oliver Wendell was only ever meant to write stories, lost within his own worlds of imagination. He was never meant to be a soldier. He was never meant to see his brother die. Yet in the midst of the first World War he finds himself caught within the wreckage of both grief and carnal destruction that has torn such worlds away. Seeking refuge from it all, the disgraced boy soldier hides himself away within the decaying seaside manor of his grandparents-- finding there a mysterious and unfinished book that has reignited his passion for the written word. Yet amidst the house's ancient bones lay the unexplainable, and beneath its foundations lay unimaginable horrors waiting to be awakened with a few strokes of a writer's pen... Written for ONC 2024 using prompt 66; A grim fairytale is unfolding before your eyes. As its author, it's up to you to put an end to this nightmare. And prompt 5; Horror is in the eye of the beholder. CW; This book contains graphic scenes, descriptions of war and PTSD, and details of eldritch horror. It is intended for readers ages 16 and up.