Hey all!

I actually made the round three winners on the Open Novella Contest 2026 on Wattpad.

I’m on the shortlist as well. I didn’t make the final 5, but that’s okay, there were thousands of contestants this year, so even making the top 50 was still huge for me.

My story “House of Doors” is available on their page under worldwalkerdj if you want to check it out.

Writing for the contest was very fun. We got to pick from a list of prompts, all fantasy themed.

I actually took a story I wrote when I was a kid and repurposed it into the novella format, under 40,000 words.

I then lengthened it and submitted it to the Watty’s.

I’m very unlikely to win anything for that contest, it’s the biggest one on the platform, but if any of you would like to check out the story anyway, I can post the link at the bottom of this entry.

If you’re curious, the plot goes like this:

We’re introduced to Ian Deavor, a rich college grad who’s basically living a boring life with no adventure and no challenges. His only effort is into running first dates with perspective rich heiresses so that his mother can’t force him to get married.

He’s set up on one such date with a girl who never speaks during the whole time, but instead slips him a old key, and a note with an address to come to if he has the nerve.

Ian is going to refuse, but then his younger sister Natalie pressures him into going.

Expecting a prank or kidnapping, Ian instead finds a house that is completely empty, except for hallway of mysteriously multicolored doors.

Of course he tries one of the doors and finds out his date was hiding a very bizarre secret and he’s just been ensared into helping her solve her problem, or he may end up sharing her fate.

The story relies on old fairy tale tropes, such as the weirdly ironic nature of curses, and also more modern classics as well.

I basically wrote it as an homage to all the older Grimm and French Fairy tales, as well as old English and Scottish lore around the fay/elf land. The style of the story is both humorously modern and also modeled after how these old stories generally mixed ordinary real life things with magic and curses. I loved reading those stories growing up and most modern adaptations try to take out the older style and just make it quasi-romantic. Which is fine, if that’s what you like, but I thought maybe my audience might appreciate a more unique approach.

Though I named my two MCs after a witty sibling duo in a book series I enjoyed that had nothing to do with fairy tales, but it did have to do with solving a centuries old mystery, so I guess it kind of connected there. They were also British, incidentally.

So if that sounded interesting to you, you can check it out here:

https://www.wattpad.com/story/408448393-the-house-of-doors