Firstly, the hard word. The internet is an international forum. It is your responsibility to know what you are, and are not legally permitted to read, and to make your personal decision to read with due regard for the laws of your jurisdiction (and, in the case of minors, your guardians). Stories are marked with ratings and I recommend that you use them. I'm not a supporter of foam-padding the world. I provide the information needed to choose wisely, I believe, but the final choice is your responsibility.

So. That's the heavy "don't come crying to me" part out of the way.

On a more personal note, if you're one of my school students, it's possible you may have come here by following links from some of my more kid-friendly sites (such as my art site, which I know some of you have visited). So, I want you to understand something. This site is not a kids' site. It isn't pornographic, but it's definitely adult reading. I write a lot of stories for an adult audience. There are stories here of people recovering from major trauma, such as war and rape. Stories of people who have faced terrible moral dilemmas. There's adult language. Not everyone in my stories does the right thing - a lot of my work deals with people who have done terribly wrong things and who have to learn to live with that truth about themselves. And there are sexual references here, too, although not of a particularly titillating kind. So it's not something you should be reading without discernment and adult guidance.

So I want you to promise me something. Promise me you won't come into this site without talking to your parents or an adult you trust. I don't object to you reading what I write, but I don't want you to read it without an adult's input. I haven't given any of you the link to this site, and there's a reason for that. It's adult material. You're all good, discerning, responsible kids, and I know I can trust you to do the right thing here. Show your parents this notice, and let them guide you. And if they read something here and they feel you aren't ready to read it, trust them about that, too.

Parents, the stories here derive their ratings more or less from the norms of the Moving Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is usual in the online writing world. NC17 means no children aged under 17. Usually NC17 stories will involve explicit violence or explicit sexual references and are not suitable for children. R is a softer version of NC17, and a lot of my work is R. R deals in adult concepts - recovery from violence, sexual identity issues, significant moral dilemmas, war or the threat of war, and so on, and may include low-level sex (ie, a couple of paragraphs of detail). PG-13 is a higher level of parental guidance - stories that reference the kinds of things found in a R story, but in less graphic detail. PG is a lower level of parental guidance, and is pretty harmless - it may deal in adult dilemmas, but there is no real need for a sophisticated reader to understand the nuances, and no graphic sexuality or violence.

To get some idea of the ways in which I've applied the ratings, NC17 was applied to one story in which the specifics of sexual activity between consenting adults was used as a power play, and another in which a woman grappled with and eventually overcame sexual dysfunction arising from past manipulation. R was applied to a story in which a man reared as part of a military project retained unusual and unhealthy philosophical beliefs about human life and his place in the world until very late in the story - the near-absence of corrective points of view makes this a story that should only be read by someone with the moral and philosophical maturity to understand that this doesn't represent a "good" point of view that should be emulated. R was also applied to a story about a pair of adult siblings in a situation of extreme isolation and trauma who formed an incestuous attachment as a result. Again, this should only be read by someone with the benefit of moral and emotional maturity. PG13 and PG have been applied to a story where a hired assassin talks to his intended victim and then lets her go, and a story in which two terminally ill people agree to take part in risky military medical experiments - stories in which significant dilemmas are faced but there are fewer problems of "wrong" POVs requiring sophistication and/or corrective.

If you have any queries, please feel free to contact me. Since becoming aware that some of the children have found my art site, I have done my best to make my sites child-friendly, and endeavoured to delineate the truly kidsafe areas from the more adult areas. Fundamentally, however, this is my online space, and it is therefore adult space, and it's very important for children to have parental supervision when they surf the web.