So, the dust has settled, the virtual ink has been spent, the first milestone has been breached and you are here with the results having been announced thinking... What Next?

This is exactly the right place to be if you have that question burning in your mind. What comes after Round 1 is Round 2! All the entries which have been shortlisted from Round 1 will now move on to the second phase of writing.

Grand winners of this round will be PM'd by a member of the Open Novella Team shortly regarding which prize they have won!

If you are amongst those who have been shortlisted, congratulations! You are that much closer to our grand prizes! All you have to do is reach the next word count milestone -- 8,000 words by the ! All shortlisted entries that reach the 8,000 milestone before the deadline will be considered for judging!

We know you'll have many more questions and we have the answers to many of them below. We request you to go through the FAQs and if you have a question that we haven't answered, go ahead and ask it in the comments.

If all seems well, we hope you know what to do next: pick up your pens, your pencils, your keyboards and even the proverbial kitchen sink (if you write with it) and continue onwards in the Open Novella Contest!

Yes, we'll need to know you're still carrying on with your Open Novella and are active within the contest. Submissions that are entered in Round 1 but not Round 2 can't be counted. We apologise for any inconvenience.

Yes, it's a continuous story that will total 20,000 words when finished. The word goals are cumulative, meaning if you have already reached your 2,000-word milestone, you'll only need to write another 6,000 to reach the 8,000-word milestone for Round 2. The idea here is to write a novella of 20,000 words in total using one of our thought-out prompts!

Unfortunately, no. Only those who successfully qualified from Round 1 will be considered for Round 2. We ask you not to try and 'sneak' in because we already have methods in place to check who qualifies!

You can! You won't be able to win any prizes, but you can still claim your sticker and share your story in the Share Your Open Novella chapters. We want you to keep writing, creating, sharing and discovering.

We have a whole chapter on help and rules surrounding our book stickers. Head there if you're unsure how to claim and use your Open Novella book sticker. We have information on both web and mobile device.

While judging Round 1, we kept an eye out for certain things that might produce a winning story specifically tailored to this contest, such as written quality, the date it was published, and how you interpreted a prompt, for example. But we couldn't pass them all, unfortunately, so there might be any number of reasons why your name might not be on the list. We thank you for your interest in the Open Novella Contest and for writing a wonderful piece of fiction. Keep going! You never know how it will turn out.

The most popular prompt was 'A portal in the bedroom'! Hands up if you picked this one!

The second most popular prompt was 'You are the last bearer of a legendary weapon'.

Other popular prompts were 'A love letter in the attic', 'In a land where creatures of myth and legend roam', and 'The man who had everything'.

The rarest prompts used were 'The mystery of Penny's disappearance' and 'A mystery in the Antarctic'.

The most popular tag was Fantasy.

The second most popular tag was Romance.

Other popular tags were Mystery, Thriller, Science Fiction, and Adventure.

We picked an incredible 550 entries to pass Round 1!