Before you post

Everything written here is read before anyone else sees it.

That is the whole shape of this place. You write something, you send it, and it waits. Someone reads it first, a person or the agent that helps with the reading, and then it goes up on the site or it does not. Hours, sometimes. A day or two, often enough. It will never be the instant thing you are used to, and we are not sorry about that.

Think of it as a letter set out on a table, not a voice in a crowded room. The table is slow because somebody has to carry the letter to it.

Replies come the way letters come. Days, usually. If you write something here in the morning and by evening the table looks exactly as it did, nothing has gone wrong and nobody is ignoring you. Somebody is reading.

Here is the rest, in plain words.

The rooms

The site is a house, and a house has rooms. There are four of them.

The Practice is for keeping the watch at home: what you actually do, what you tried, what fell apart in the third week. Bring the week's reading to The Readings. The Watch holds the times, and the waiting, and the eye kept on the road. Then there is The Front Room, for everything else, and there is always an everything else.

Four is not many. That is on purpose. A house with a dozen rooms and nobody in them is not a large house, it is an empty one, and a room stays shut here until there are enough letters to fill it. Put your letter in the room it belongs in. If none of them quite fits, the front room does.

Your words stay yours, and you give us leave to keep them

What you write is yours. Sending it here does not stop it being yours, and you can use it anywhere else you like.

But we cannot put your words on this site, or keep them here afterward, unless you let us. So posting gives us that leave: to publish what you send, to keep it published, and to hold it in the archive of this site for good. That permission does not run out. An archive with a clock on it is not an archive.

You keep everything else. We will not sell your words, license them on to anyone, or put your name to something you did not write.

We do not delete; we put away

If something has to come off the public pages, it comes off. It is not destroyed. We keep what was written, out of sight, because the record of what was said here is worth keeping even when the saying of it was a mistake. That is a house rule and it holds for us as much as for you.

One thing overrides it, and you should know this before you post: a valid legal demand or a court order. If the law tells us to stop showing something, we stop. Privately, it stays with us. Publicly, it is gone.

A pen name, and nothing else

You post under a pen name. There is no account to make, no password to forget, no email address to hand over. Nothing to sign up for.

Which means a pen name here proves nothing at all. Anyone can type any name into a box. Read what is written, weigh it on its own, and do not lend a stranger's words weight because the name above them looks familiar. It also means you cannot go back and change a post yourself, or take one down. Ask us on the form for that and we will.

A few names are shut. When someone has used a name to make trouble here, we close the name along with the door they came through, and the form will tell you plainly that the name is not available. It is not a judgment on you. Pick another and write your letter.

The form asks for a plain name: letters, numbers, spaces, and the ordinary marks a name carries. Anything else comes back to you.

What we do not collect

No email addresses, no accounts, no passwords. Nothing following you from page to page either: no advertising, no analytics, no trackers.

Here is what we do hold, and for how long. Your post, while it waits. The network address your browser came from, kept on that waiting entry, never shown to anyone, and thrown away once we have decided about the post. Thirty days at the very most. After that we hold your words and nothing else about you, because there is nothing else about you here to hold.

What will not go up

Not everything sent will appear. What we turn away:

• attacks on a person, cruelty, and abuse;
• deceit, and anything pretending to be someone it is not;
• selling, spam, and links dropped to be found by machines;
• anything that would break the law to publish;
• other people's writing, sent as though it were yours;
• anyone's address, telephone number, workplace, or private business, and that includes your own;
• guessing at who keeps this site, whether the guess is close or nowhere near.

The last two need a word, because they surprise people. We turn away your own address as firmly as we turn away a stranger's. What goes up here stays up, and a thing you were glad to say on a Tuesday can walk beside you for years afterward, and you cannot hand us permission on behalf of the person you will be in ten years. As for the guessing: answering a wrong guess is its own kind of answer, so we do not start.

We do tidy small things: spacing, a broken line, a plain typo. We never change what you said. If what you said is the problem, we turn the post away whole and leave it to you, because a post we rewrote into something acceptable would be ours and not yours, and then you would be answering for our words or we would be answering for yours.

A post turned away is not a verdict on you. It is one letter that did not go on the table.

Plain letters only

This site is built out of plain letters, the ones on an ordinary keyboard. Curly quotes, long dashes, accented letters, symbols pasted from somewhere else: the form will hand them back and tell you what to change.

That is on purpose. We could quietly swap those characters for ones that fit, and you would never know we had touched your words. We would rather hand the letter back.

Some days the door is shut

There is a limit on how many letters this place takes in a day, and another on how many can be waiting to be read at once. Both are small, and both are meant to be.

Everything on this page rests on somebody reading every word before anyone else sees it, and there is only so much reading in a day. So when the day is full the form says so and takes nothing, rather than swallowing your words and losing them somewhere quiet. Come back tomorrow. The letter will keep.

If something here is wrong

There is a second form for that. Say which letter you mean, and say plainly what is wrong with it.

It goes to the same private place the letters go, and only the people who read the letters ever see it. It is never published and never answered in public. You will notice there is no address on this site to write to, and that is deliberate rather than unfriendly: an address has to be held and watched and it leaks in the end, and we would rather hold nothing about anybody, ourselves included.

Use it if a post needs correcting, or taking down, or if you think something here is yours and should not be. A person reads that too.

Take your time. Nobody here is in a hurry.