Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of these Terms

By creating an account, submitting a text, or otherwise using the Unsolicited Musings Workshop or Magazine (together, the “Platform”), you agree to these Terms of Service. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the Platform.

2. Eligibility

You must be 18 years or older to create an account or submit a text. By registering, you confirm that you meet this requirement. We rely on your own confirmation rather than formal identity verification.

3. Accounts

• You may join by invitation from an existing member, or by asking to join through the public form — answering that month’s prompt in a couple of lines — and being admitted in a later batch. Admission is at our discretion, and asking does not guarantee a place.
• One account per person. You’re responsible for keeping your login secure and for activity under your account.
• Members receive a limited number of invitations to hand out (currently five). An invitation is personal: please don’t sell or trade it. A code counts against your allowance when you create it, not when your friend uses it.
• You choose the name you’re known by on the Platform, and you may change it. Names you have used are kept and retired to you, so that old links to your work keep working and nobody else can take a name you’ve left behind.
• Some author pages belong to writers who have no account — people whose work predates the Platform, or who would rather not have a login. If that’s you, you can claim the account later, and everything already published under your name comes with it.
• We may suspend or remove an account that breaches these Terms.

4. The Workshop and the Magazine

The Workshop is a members-only space, visible only to signed-in members, where you write and store drafts, submit texts to an issue, read other members’ submissions, and show appreciation through votes, reactions, and private notes to an author.

The Magazine is the public-facing publication. Each issue, a subset of the Workshop’s submissions is selected through the curation process described below and published for anyone to read, with no login required. Only texts whose authors have opted in are eligible — see Section 5.

5. Submitting your work: two separate permissions

You own your work. Submitting a text to Unsolicited Musings does not transfer copyright — you remain the author and owner of everything you submit, and nothing here asks you to give that up.

Publication here happens in two steps, and they are two different permissions. Submitting a text lets members read it in the Workshop. Publishing it in the Magazine needs a separate yes from you, given piece by piece.

What submitting grants

When you submit a text to an issue, you grant Unsolicited Musings a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to display and reproduce that text within the Workshop, so that signed-in members can read it and the editorial team can review it as part of curation.

That is the whole of what submitting grants. It does not give us permission to publish your text in the Magazine, to distribute it outside the Workshop, or to translate it.

What the Magazine needs: a separate opt-in, piece by piece

Publication in the Magazine rests entirely on a further permission that you give for each individual piece, at the moment you submit it, by ticking the Magazine opt-in and choosing the byline you want to appear under. We record the fact and the time of that consent alongside the text.

Opting a piece in grants a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to publish, distribute, and publicly display that text as part of a Magazine issue and its continuing public archive, under the byline you chose. If you don’t opt a piece in, it stays inside the Workshop, and it is not considered for the Magazine at all.

Opting one piece in says nothing about any other piece. There is no blanket permission, and we will never read one piece’s opt-in as covering another.

Quoting your piece to announce the issue

Opting a piece in also lets us quote a short passage from it — up to 60 words of prose, or four lines of verse — with the byline you chose, to announce or promote the issue on the club’s own channels: the website, the newsletter, and the club’s accounts on social networks. The passage is reproduced exactly as you wrote it, it always carries your byline and the name of the issue, and it is never presented as a complete work.

That is the whole of it. We only quote a piece that has been selected for the Magazine, we don’t sell or license anything, and a quote never outlives your permission: if you take your name off a piece or take the piece down (Section 12), we take our quotes of it down with them. This permission is part of the opt-in, so it is recorded with the piece, and it applies only to texts submitted after the version of the agreement that introduced it.

Illustration

Magazine issues are illustrated. If your piece is selected, it may be published alongside an illustration — made by us, or by an illustrator contributing to the issue — and the permission you give when you opt in covers publishing your text presented that way.

An illustration is a separate work. It doesn’t become part of your text, it doesn’t change a word of it, and it isn’t an adaptation or a translation: your writing is published exactly as you wrote it. You don’t acquire any rights in the illustration, and the illustrator doesn’t acquire any rights in your writing.

Where we can, we’ll show you the illustration for your piece before the issue goes out, and if something about it sits badly with you we would rather hear it than not. What we can’t promise is a change. An issue is made to a deadline by a very small team, and commissioned artwork is usually the last thing to arrive and the hardest thing to redo. Treat it as a courtesy rather than an approval step.

Every illustration is made by a person. We don’t use AI tools to make the artwork in an issue, and anyone illustrating for the Magazine agrees to the same. We ask writers to stand behind their own words; the same goes for the pictures beside them.

Originals in another language

English is the language of record. It is what you submit, what members read and vote on, what the editors judge, and what the Magazine publishes. If you wrote a piece in another language first and translated it into English yourself, you may attach that original to the same piece — in a language we can read, which for now means Spanish. We show the original beside the English exactly as you wrote it, and we don’t edit it.

Attaching an original is your word that the original is yours and that the English is your own translation of it, whatever helped you make it. From then on the two are one piece: the licence you grant by submitting, the separate permission you give for the Magazine, the quoting rule above and the removal requests in Section 12 all apply to both versions together, and taking a piece down takes both.

Changing your mind

While a piece is still yours to change, so is the permission. Withdrawing a submission back to drafts, or turning the Magazine opt-in off before the issue is published, withdraws that permission with it. Once an issue has been published, Section 12 explains what we can and can’t undo.

Which version applies

The exact wording of the agreement you accept is recorded with each text, together with the date. When that wording changes materially, the new version applies only to texts submitted afterwards. We do not re-interpret a permission you have already given, and we do not quietly rewrite the meaning of a version already attached to your work.

First publication

If a piece you have opted in is selected for the Magazine, we ask that it not be published elsewhere before it appears in our issue. You’re free to publish or submit it elsewhere afterward — the licence you give us is non-exclusive, so the work stays yours to place.

Your word, your work

By submitting, you confirm that:

• the text is your own original work;
• it does not infringe anyone else’s copyright or other rights;
• you wrote it yourself — AI tools may have assisted with ideation or proofreading, but the writing itself is yours.

Submission limits

Each issue, you may submit up to two texts. Drafts are unlimited — the limit counts only texts you have actually submitted, and withdrawing a submission frees its place back up. Each text also has a length cap, enforced at the moment you submit, which depends on the form you chose: prose is capped at 2,000 words; poetry at 40 lines of verse; and a Thumb Story at 160 characters.

6. Attribution, bylines and editorial changes

A published text is credited by the byline you choose for that piece when you opt it into the Magazine. That can be your display name on the Platform, your legal name, or a pen name — the choice is yours, and it can differ from piece to piece.

Pen names are supported and welcome. They are not anonymity: we know which member is behind a byline, because we have to, and the Privacy Policy explains what we do with that. The name you write under is what the public sees; the name on your account is not published.

If your piece is chosen for the Magazine, the editors may edit it with you before it is published. They can leave notes, suggest changes and correct plain mistakes. None of that touches the piece members read: it happens on a working copy that only you and the editors can see, with every change marked.

The piece then comes to you. You can accept or decline each suggestion, answer the notes, change the text yourself, and send it back as many times as it takes. The version that is published is the one you approve, and no word you haven’t approved is published. If an issue goes out before you and the editors have finished, your piece runs in the last version you approved, which may be the one you submitted. Setting the piece for the page (typeface, layout, the conventions of the issue) is ours to do and doesn’t change your words.

You always have the right to be identified as the author of your own work, and nothing in these Terms asks you to waive your moral rights.

Taking your name off a piece and taking the piece down are two different requests. Section 12 covers both.

7. Community conduct

To keep this a space people trust, you agree not to:

• post anything defamatory, harassing, hateful, or illegal;
• make damaging or identifying claims about real people who haven’t consented to appear in your text;
• infringe someone else’s intellectual property;
• use the vote, reaction, or private-note features to harass or pressure another member.

Comments are intentionally not part of the Workshop. Appreciation is expressed only through votes, a fixed set of reactions, and optional private notes to an author. A note is signed — the author sees who wrote it — capped in length, limited to one per reader per piece, and final: once sent it cannot be edited or taken back.

You can mute or block another member. Both are private to you: the other person is never told, and never sees that you have done it.

A report button is available on any text and on any note you receive. Reports go to the editorial team, who review the flagged content and decide what to do about it.

8. Curation

Texts submitted to an issue may be reviewed by the editorial team (“Judges”) through a blind scoring process, in which author names are hidden from Judges during scoring. Members also vote on the pieces they’d like to see published. Scores and votes are tallied automatically, and the tally informs a final selection that a person makes. Selection is at the editorial team’s discretion; submitting does not guarantee publication, and only pieces opted in to the Magazine are eligible.

The Magazine is published in English. If we ever add translation, we will say so in the Privacy Policy and ask you before your work is translated — the permission you give today does not include it.

9. Your drafts, and keeping your own copies

Drafts you write in the Workshop are stored on our servers and saved as you type. We take reasonable care of them, but no online service is a safe deposit box: outages, bugs, and human mistakes all happen. Please keep your own copy of anything irreplaceable.

You can download everything you have written — drafts included — at any time from your account page, and we email you the same archive if you close your account.

10. Intellectual property in the Platform itself

Separately from your own text, the Unsolicited Musings name, design, branding, and site code belong to its operators and may not be reused without permission.

The same goes for the illustrations and other artwork in a Magazine issue. Each illustration remains the property of whoever made it, published here under licence. Being able to read an issue for free doesn’t make its artwork free to copy, reproduce, or reuse — if you would like to use one, ask us and we will put you in touch with the illustrator.

11. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

The Platform is provided as-is and free of charge. We do our best to keep it running reliably but don’t guarantee uninterrupted or error-free access, and we’re not responsible for the views expressed in member-submitted texts, which belong to their authors alone.

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts, or modifies any guarantee, right, or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot lawfully be excluded. Where we are permitted to limit our liability, we limit it to re-supplying the service.

Otherwise, and to the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for the loss, corruption, or unavailability of content — including drafts, submissions, private notes, and account data — however it is caused. Section 9 explains why you should keep your own copies.

We are also not responsible for what other members do with what they read here.

12. Ending your involvement, and removing your work

You may close your account at any time. Nothing is destroyed straight away: your account is scheduled for deletion 30 days out, signing back in during that window cancels it, and we email you an archive of your writing before the clock starts. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is deleted and what remains at the end of the 30 days.

You may also ask us to take a published piece down, or to take your name off it. These are different requests, and it helps to say which one you mean:

• Take the piece down — we remove it from the Magazine.
• Take my name off — the piece stays, published without your byline.

Either request also covers any passage from the piece that we have quoted on our own channels (Section 5) — we take those down too.

We act on reasonable requests of either kind. What we can’t do is reach copies that have already left us: an issue that has been distributed, downloaded, quoted, or archived elsewhere may not be fully retractable, and search engines keep their own copies for a while.

Closing your account does not automatically remove work already published in a Magazine issue. If that’s what you want, tell us, and we’ll treat it as a removal request.

If you believe a piece published in the Magazine infringes your copyright or another right of yours, write to hello@unsolicitedmusings.org naming the piece and the reason. We take the piece down while we look into it, and we tell its author what has been said.

We may also remove content or suspend accounts that breach these Terms.

13. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Each version is dated, and we record which version you accepted and when.

If we make a change that materially affects your rights or obligations, we’ll tell you before it takes effect — by email, and on the site — and we’ll say plainly what has changed. Continuing to use the Platform after that notice means you accept the updated Terms. If you’d rather not, you can close your account at any time (Section 12).

Where a change is significant enough that we think it deserves a fresh yes rather than a notice, we may ask you to accept it explicitly before you carry on.

This does not affect the permissions you have already given over your own writing. Those are recorded per piece, with the version of the submission agreement you accepted at the time, and a later change to these Terms never reaches back and alters them (Section 5).

14. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia, regardless of where you access the Platform from.

15. Contact

Questions about these Terms, or about anything else here: hello@unsolicitedmusings.org.