Last updated 8 August 2026
This is a writer’s website. It sells nothing, hosts no accounts, and takes no payments. There is exactly one place where it asks you for anything, and this section explains what happens there.
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 records the ordinary things an email service records — whether a message was opened, whether a link was clicked. I use that to know whether an issue landed, 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, so writing to me is just email, held in my mailbox like any other letter.
No analytics. No visitor tracking of any kind. No advertising networks, no tracking pixels, no cookies set by me, no profile built about you, and nothing sold or shared with anyone for marketing.
Videos are embedded with a click-to-play placeholder rather than the usual YouTube player, so nothing loads from YouTube — no player, no cookies — unless you actually press play. If you never press it, YouTube never learns you were here.
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:
Every newsletter email has a one-click unsubscribe at the bottom, and it works immediately and permanently. You do not need to ask me.
If you would rather I delete your address outright, or you want to know what is held about you, or you want it corrected — write to contact@davidjgailey.com and I will do it. You do not need to give a reason, and you do not need to live anywhere in particular for this to apply. It is a short list and I can act on it by hand.
Every chapter, story, poem, speech, essay, reflection and newsletter issue on this site is © David J. Gailey, and published here complete and 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 it, or present it as your own work.
The writing on this site may not be used to train, fine-tune, or otherwise develop machine learning or generative AI systems, and may not be collected into any dataset for that purpose, without my prior written permission.
This applies to every piece of prose and poetry published here, and it applies whether the collection is done by hand, by crawler, or by any automated means. Publishing my work where people can read it for free is not consent to have it absorbed 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 it is complete or error-free, and links to other people’s sites are not endorsements of what they 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.