Last updated 8 August 2026
This is a writer’s website. It does not currently process purchases, host customer accounts, or take payments. It may link to books and other work available through publishers or third-party retailers, but any purchase made there is handled by that service, not by this site.
There is exactly one place where I ask you to provide personal information: the newsletter form. This section explains what happens there.
The only information I ask you to provide is your email address, and only if you type it into the newsletter form yourself.
That form is operated by Kit (formerly ConvertKit), which stores the address and sends you Third Row. Kit also keeps information associated with the subscription and newsletter delivery, such as when and how you subscribed and whether an email was opened or a link was clicked. Opens are measured using a small tracking image included in the email.
I use that information to send the newsletter and understand whether an issue reached and interested its readers, nothing more.
I do not ask for your name, and there is no other form on this site.
The contact page is a plain email address. If you write to me, I receive your email address and whatever you choose to put in the message, held in my mailbox like any other email.
I use Netlify’s built-in web analytics to understand basic, aggregate information about how the site is used — things like how many visits the site receives, which pages are viewed, and where visitors are referred from.
Netlify generates these analytics from its server data rather than by placing an analytics cookie in your browser. On my current Netlify plan, the analytics are available to me for only seven days.
I use them to understand whether people are finding and reading the site, not to identify individual visitors or build profiles about them.
I do not use Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, advertising networks, or behavioral tracking tools.
I do not sell your personal information, give it to advertisers or data brokers, or build a browsing profile about you.
The site itself does not use cookies for accounts, advertising or personalization. Some of the services described below may receive ordinary technical information when your browser connects to them.
Videos are displayed with a click-to-play placeholder rather than loading the usual YouTube player immediately. No YouTube player, and no YouTube cookie, is loaded until you press play. The placeholder image itself is served from YouTube’s image servers, so those servers do receive a request when such a page loads. If you press play, your browser then connects to YouTube directly, and YouTube may receive technical information about that request under its own privacy policies.
Simply loading a web page tells the servers involved your IP address. That is true everywhere, and it is worth naming who those servers are:
I do not sell or provide your information to any of these services for their own advertising purposes.
Every newsletter email has a one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom. Unsubscribing takes effect immediately. You do not need to ask me.
Unsubscribing stops the newsletter; deleting your subscriber record is a separate thing. If you would rather I delete the information associated with your subscription, or you want to know what is held about you or have something corrected, write to contact@davidjgailey.com.
I will remove the information I control and use Kit’s available tools to remove the subscriber record it holds, subject only to any limited information a service may be required to retain for legal, security or backup purposes.
You do not need to give a reason, and you do not need to live anywhere in particular for me to honor the request.
This site is intended for a general audience and is not directed to children under 13. I do not knowingly collect newsletter subscriptions from children under 13. If I learn that I have, I will delete the address.
Unless otherwise credited, the chapters, stories, poems, speeches, essays, reflections and newsletter issues published on this site are © David J. Gailey.
They are published here free to read. That is a deliberate choice about access. It is not a transfer of rights.
You are welcome to link to anything here, quote a short passage with attribution, or share a link with someone who might like it. That is what it is for.
What you may not do is republish a piece in full, sell or commercially redistribute it, or present it as your own work.
All rights not expressly granted here are reserved.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, no license or permission is granted to use the writing on this site to train, fine-tune, or otherwise develop machine-learning or generative-AI systems, or to collect or include it in a dataset for those purposes, without my prior written permission.
This applies to every piece of prose and poetry published here and whether collection is done by hand, by crawler, or by any other automated means.
This is an express reservation of my rights, including rights relating to text and data mining where applicable.
Publishing my work where people can read it for free is not permission to absorb it into a model.
The memoir and autofiction on this site are written from memory, which is an honest but imperfect instrument. Names and details are sometimes changed where a real person’s privacy is involved.
The fiction is fiction.
I keep the site accurate as far as I can, but I make no guarantee that everything here is complete or error-free. Links to other people’s sites are provided because they may be useful or relevant; they are not endorsements of everything those sites publish.
If this page changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with it.
Questions about any of the above go to contact@davidjgailey.com.