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CONTEST ENDED – Thank you for submitting your stories!

Write a story about an author who has just published a book.

Posted in Adults on Oct 26, 2022

Submissions are closed

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✍️ 88 stories

“You Have Written a New York Times Best Seller!” by Kristen Jan

Submitted to Contest #46

In and out. Inhale and exhale. Breathe. Drink. Eat. Rest. Listen to music. Watch a movie. Spend time with your family. Family…Your heart should be soaring but for some reason it is thumping loudly, violently in your chest. Why are you so scared?! The book you have spent years tirelessly working on has been published, yet you don’t emerge from your den. You don’t return to reality to give the warm hugs you’ve been longing to give, and the look in your eyes that tells others you are truly present doesn’t return.This is what you promised. Once ...

2 comments 2
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“The Word” by Katherine Nikolau

Submitted to Contest #46

Maury clinked his glass with the mirror, mumbling something unintelligible. The reflection behind the glass seemed to taunt him. Look, it said. Look who you’ve become.  As his vision blurred together, he set down his bottle of scotch and concentrated very hard on not vomiting or succumbing to the pounding darkness behind his eyes. It was a more challenging task than writing his latest novel had been. This is what it had come to. He, a man who had spent a lifetime fantasizing about being the next Ernest Hemingway and writing the Great A...

4 comments 4
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“VENTURES TO ANNOY” by RADIUS HAVWAALA

Submitted to Contest #46

Ventures to annoy. You are still dazed from the previous night’s celebration, called by a few friends to toast your newly published book; ventures to annoy. Only one event still comes glaringly plain to you. The brush with a reporter.“Have you written other books?” a New York Times diva swirls her brunette brush into a wave, a few strands almost sweep the eyes from your face.Her steady pupils stabbing into your eyeballs fearlessly indicate that she is way above your class; you know it and she seems to know it as well.“No it is my first…...

4 comments 4
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“Dear Diary: Pride Leads to Pain” by Ella Kinnett

Submitted to Contest #46

Dear Diary:   I have been waiting for this moment my whole life. Today is the day that my book, The Man in the Mist is going to be published! I have always written short stories and things that I personally think are terrific, but The Man in the Mist is definitely my best work. It’s a mystery about this man that… well I’m not going to spoil it. If you want to read it, you’re going to have to buy it. What I’m most excited about is that I am definitely going to be famous after a few weeks. Everybody is going to know my name and are going ...

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“A Life's Work” by Katharine Tierney

Submitted to Contest #46

The Oak Tree Pub is the type of bar that you picture when you hear a joke beginning "A horse walks into a bar..." A dusty little dive, where the neighborhood guys congregate after work for a quick beer on a hot afternoon before they go home to the wife and kids, and any time the Red Sox are playing. The decor is mid-century scavenged, the ambience just this side of grim. On this particular afternoon, Bill, the owner and principle bartender, has strung up the same battered Christmas lights and bent tinsel honeycomb bells that he has been hang...

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“Magic and manic” by Zainab M. M.

Submitted to Contest #46

"WHY DID YOU KILL ME?!" Dumbledore asked. He was in one of his moods and not to be messed with. Rowling stared and stared hard, at the life-size replicas of the characters from the poster that adorned her writing desk. It stood by the corner window, directly above her head, a hand-drawn gift from a lover of the magical world she had created. For the past few weeks, she had been working incessantly at the putting the final touches to her latest draft "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", so much so that she had almost lost touch with real...

2 comments 2
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“So It is Written” by Rhonda Allen

Submitted to Contest #46

Wow, I finally did it, published a book. Well it is more of a novelette, but yet still a book. Like many people, my childhood was full of amazing tales of the imagination, I would daydream for hours about all the possibilities the future holds, sometimes I would write it down, but most of the time I stored it away in my memory. All the dreams of being Discovered, fame, fortune and terror, all the what would I do if I …… met an alien…….married a prince…..had millions of dollars……the dreams were endless. Then life happened, as I grew, I took t...

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“The printers called...” by Simanga Kunene

Submitted to Contest #46

Anna finished writing her book about a couple of weeks ago. Little did she know that she was in for a surprise. When she started writing it was supposed to be a diary entry as she normally wrote daily in her diary about events in her life. After finishing college there was not much that she could do. She wanted a job and could not find any job that would pay her for permanent employment. She soon decided to work for an employment agency. Writing came easy to her. One day on a whim, she sat down and started to write, and she ended up writing ...

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“Look Mom, I Made It” by Yair Ron

Submitted to Contest #46

Three years. I’m sitting in my car, staring at the memory of the house I grew up in, surprised it still fits. Oh, there were some changes - New wind chimes in the porch, unfamiliar additions to my dad’s dusty, expansive collection that wakes up the whole neighborhood every storm. Fresh paint on the door, the unfaded brown matching the new car filling the garage. A new bicycle, its bubblegum pink a contrast to the old rusted set whose metallic squeal was the soundtrack of my childhood.And yet somehow, as I stare at my parents' house for ...

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“Forgive me?” by Revekah Halo

Submitted to Contest #46

What have I done? What horrible devil compelled me to do as I've done, to sin as I have. There's no going back, there's no forgiveness for the breach I've torn into my own life, my one and only. I've taken the most precious of feelings and doused it in horror and regret, painted over the beautiful words of a priceless poem with vile insults as the author watched and cried. Such is the horror. Such is the pain.I stare, face rid of all blood, at the reason of my self-torment, at the words that have brought me my doom. The cursor blinks back at...

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“The Beasts Behind Me” by Annie Wong

Submitted to Contest #46

Cory Anderson walked the city streets, the crisp autumn breeze blowing the leaves away. “Did you hear? The book “The Beasts Behind Me” is so popular these days! But it's crazy since he literally just published it not too long ago!” A girl said to her friend on the left, oblivious to the fact that the author is standing there himself in person, right next to her.“Duh. I finished it, like, yesterday,” The girl’s friend rolled her eyes, “you just heard about it? I can’t believe you just knew about this-”Cory briskly walked past the girls, almos...

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“Over the Rainbow Bridge: Mom’s Passing” by Andirea Bowe

Submitted to Contest #46

 In March of 2014, less than three weeks from her 103rd birthday on the 26th, her mom passed on peacefully with Joshua and the little girl who could standing by as first her feet, and then her body, turned blue. They knew and called the coroner who confirmed “her heart gave out” diagnosis. Since her mom had paid for her own cremation in 1985, and did not want a funeral, they only held a small memorial in the Art Depot, where her mom, at 99, during a woodworker’s exhibition, got to sit on the same seat she sat on as a child of nine when ...

2 comments 2
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“Newest Release from Denise” by Sue Winn

Submitted to Contest #46

Trembling, I stood in line for Denise's autograph. Meeting writers never made me nervous, but this was different. I was sweating, and not just from the summer heat. I didn't just want to meet this author: I wanted to be this author. How did she accomplish selling one million copies of her cozy mystery in less than a month? All the late-night talk show hosts fought to have her appear on their shows. CBS leaked that a movie deal was in the making. Anywhere you looked on social media, you found a post mentioning her book. The person in front ...

2 comments 2
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“Hunted ” by Anny Park

Submitted to Contest #46

I was happy, why not? I just punished my book... and At first was successful but after time my book didn't sell that good and a while more nobody talked about my book "The Darkest Desire". Why? What went wrong? I did my best, I put my blood sweat and tears in this book and for what ? So nobody talk about it. I was angry, I was hopeless and nothing I did mattered anymore. How could I survive through that? How can I make a name for myself when the competition is high and the fight is so fierce? What can I do? I don't have the money for adverti...

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“Dreck” by Kieran Coghlan

Submitted to Contest #46

The bestsellers’ rack: the most depressing sight Clive ever gazed upon. Yet a casual observer would never guess by the frequency he subjected himself to it. He flicked through the number one book: a young woman’s voyage of self-discovery. Like there haven’t been a billion of those already. And what was this next to it? Some run-of-the-mill techno thriller. And the number three spot: vampires? Dear God, were they back? Clive sighed, replaced the book on the shelf and left the shop. He could write something infinitely better, but why bother? P...

2 comments 2
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