Content guidelines

The prose readers read has to be written by you. That applies to every SDO Original, not only to competition entries — there is one rulebook here, and this is it.

AI is a fine tool for the work around the writing: editing a draft you wrote, proofreading, checking grammar when English is not your first language, or brainstorming where a plot could go. It is not a tool for generating the chapters themselves.

We do not run automated AI detection and we make no claim to. Suspected violations are read and reviewed by the SDO editorial team, and we act on what we read.

Four things are off the table on SDO Originals, in every genre and at every rating:

• Illegal content. Anything unlawful to publish or to distribute.
• Sexual content involving minors. No exceptions and no framing that gets around it. Characters written into sexual situations are adults.
• Work that is not yours. Plagiarism, scraped or machine-translated reuploads, and reposting a story you do not hold the rights to. Publishing here means you own what you publish.
• Hate content. Content that attacks people over race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability. Writing a bigoted character is not the same as promoting bigotry — the line is advocacy, not depiction.

Work that crosses this floor is removed, and repeat breaches put your publishing access at risk. None of it is softened by a content warning: warnings classify mature themes, they do not permit prohibited content.

Mature work is welcome on SDO Originals and competes on exactly the same terms as everything else. It is handled by the project form in your author dashboard (Loom) — there is no separate approval queue and no extra permission to request.

1. You classify the work. The project form takes your genres, your tags, and up to three content warnings.
2. The 18+ mark follows those picks. Some genres and tags are adult, and the Sexual Content, Graphic Violence and Gore warnings are sensitive. Picking any one of them marks the project 18+ on its own. There is no Mature switch for you to set or unset — the classification is computed from what you selected.
3. Saving 18+ work needs your age confirmation. The first time a project of yours computes to 18+, you confirm in one click that you are 18 or older. Until you do, the Save button stays disabled — and the save is refused on the server too, so getting past the button changes nothing.

Classify honestly and the rest takes care of itself. Under-tagging to reach a wider audience is the failure we act on: a story that has earned an adult tag and is not carrying one is a guidelines breach, not a matter of taste.

On the reader side, an 18+ project carries the mark on its cover, readers confirm their own age before reading it, and it stays hidden from anyone browsing in SFW mode.

Nothing you write here is locked to SkyDemonOrder, with one exception: a competition entry, and only until entries close.

Every other story you publish as an SDO Original can also live anywhere else you want it — before, after, or at the same time. We do not ask you to take it down elsewhere, and we do not ask you to tell us where else it is.

Publishing free elsewhere costs you nothing here, either. Direct payments for Originals authors are still in development, and when they arrive, a story that is free to read on another site can still be monetized on SkyDemonOrder. That call is yours alone, and there is nothing to disclose.

• Your entry is exclusive to SkyDemonOrder. It stays here alone until entries close on April 30, 2027, after which you can keep it here or take it elsewhere. You confirm this when you enter and staff check it by hand. That exclusivity covers the entry and nothing else you write: every other novel of yours can be crossposted anywhere, with no strings.
• Any original novel you own can be the entry. There is no creation-date requirement, and you can switch the entry to a different novel or withdraw it entirely until entries close.
• Human-written prose is an entry requirement too. The platform rule above is also a condition of entry, so an entry that fails it is disqualified rather than simply reviewed.

The rest of the entry conditions — the timeline, the prizes, the published-word floor, eligibility and how winners are chosen — live on the competition rules page.

Read the competition rules