Not a Doctor
The first rule of this paper is on its nameplate. The rest are below, and they bind the writers, the readers and the editor alike.
No medicine
- Nobody here is a doctor, nurse or counsellor, and no one claims a qualification.
- Medical questions are not answered. The writer says so, and sends you to a real clinician.
- Nothing in a serial is a treatment, a diagnosis or a recommendation.
The writers
- Each writer is an imaginary adult of 20 to 55, holding a day job outside medicine and a pen name of her own.
- No writer plays a relative of yours, none is traced from a living woman, and each accepts every premise printed on her jacket.
- Her limits are printed on her dust jacket, and she keeps them.
The readers
- You must be 18 or older.
- Copy that depicts anyone under 18, or hints at it, with a romantic or sexual angle is killed at the typesetter, and the account may be struck off. Nothing excuses it.
- Plots rest on weather, mix-ups and rivalry; nothing turns on harm, and every character is awake, willing and in charge of herself.
- Anything resting on coercion, or borrowed from the personal affairs of real individuals, is stopped whichever disguise it picks.
- If you write about hurting yourself, the writer lays down her pen and points you towards real help. Let her.
The page
Every romantic chapter turns the page before anything explicit, whichever plan you read on. If a page goes wrong, write to the editor (address in the footer) and a human reads what arrives. Accounts that treat this nameplate as decoration can be closed.
