Subscription terms
The terms on which I send stories, and on which you read them.
These terms took effect in 2026 and govern the Wondersandtales story subscription I run from Singapore. They cover how plans are billed, how you cancel, what you may do with the stories, and what I keep as the author.
Effective 2026
Who these terms cover
Wondersandtales is a one-person story subscription. I write the instalments, I send them, and I answer the post that comes back to the desk. There is no other party standing between you and the work.
If you join The Sampler, Weekly Reader, or Weekly Reader + Annotated Archive, you agree to these terms. They apply whether you read on the web, in e-mail, in plain text, or as EPUB from the archive. They also apply if someone buys a plan for you and you then receive the stories.
I run this subscription from 27 Boon Tat Street, #04-02, Telok Ayer, Singapore 069623. The public identity of the work is Wondersandtales — that name, the address, the telephone number +65 6396 7452, and the address hello@WondersAndTales.eu. Reading-desk hours are Monday–Friday, 10:00–18:00 SGT. Replies usually go out within two working days. I do not correspond at the weekend.
These terms sit beside the privacy notice and the cookie note. If a sentence here and a sentence there seem to pull in different directions, write to me and I will say which one I meant. I would rather answer a precise question than hide behind a pile of cross-references.
Money, plainly
Plans, prices and billing periods
The Sampler is free. It sends one complete story a month by e-mail and on the web. It does not open the archive, the annotated drafts, or the two long stories I write each year. I never place a charge against a sampler address. If you stay on The Sampler for a decade, you will still not be billed.
Weekly Reader is SGD 9 each month or SGD 88 for a year. It includes every Sunday instalment, the single illustration, the endnote, and the right to reply to any sending and have that reply reach me. Weekly Reader + Annotated Archive is SGD 16 each month or SGD 156 for a year. It includes everything in Weekly Reader, plus the full back catalogue as EPUB, the annotated drafts, and two long stories a year.
A monthly plan renews on the same calendar day each month until you cancel. A yearly plan renews on the same date the following year until you cancel. I take payment in Singapore dollars. The price you see on the plans page is the price I charge; I do not add a surprise fee at the last step. If a bank or card issuer adds its own conversion charge, that charge is theirs, not mine, and I cannot waive it.
I send a receipt to the address you used to subscribe. Keep it if you need it for your own records. I do not issue invoices under any other name. Gift purchases work the same way: you pay, the recipient reads, and the billing period belongs to the plan you bought, not to a separate account I invent later.
Cancellation, pauses and refunds
You may cancel at any time from the link I place in every e-mail. You do not need to write a letter, give a reason, or wait for a working day. Once you cancel, the current period runs to its end and the next period simply does not start.
I do not take a cancellation fee. I also do not refund unused days inside a period that has already begun, because the stories for that period are already written, illustrated and queued. If that arrangement does not suit you, stay on The Sampler, which never asks for money.
You may switch from monthly to yearly, or from Weekly Reader to the annotated archive, by writing to hello@WondersAndTales.eu with the address you use to receive stories. I will confirm the change before the next billing date. You may pause a paid plan for one calendar month in any twelve by asking; during a pause I send nothing and I charge nothing. After the pause the plan resumes unless you cancel.
If you cancel a paid plan, your address is removed from the sending list at the end of the period. I delete the address within thirty days of that end, as the privacy notice sets out. Sampler readers who unsubscribe are treated the same way. Nothing in a cancellation stops you from joining again later; you would start from the next Sunday (or the next monthly sampler), not from a private backlog I keep on your behalf.
The work itself
Copyright and personal use
Every story I send remains mine. You buy a reading, not the tale.
I retain copyright in every instalment, illustration, endnote, annotated draft and long story issued under the name Wondersandtales. Joining a plan does not transfer that copyright. It licences you to read the work for your own private use, on your own devices, for as long as the plan (or the archive access that came with it) lasts.
You may keep copies for personal reading, including printed pages made at home, and you may store the EPUB files from the annotated archive on devices you control. You may not upload a story to a public library of files, a classroom portal that is open beyond a private group, a commercial anthology, or a site that presents my work as its own. You may not train a model on the text. You may not sell, rent or sublicence the instalments.
Subject lines, titles and opening lines are part of the work. Please do not scrape the list in order to republish a contents page elsewhere. If you wish to quote a short passage in a review or a private reading note, a few sentences with a clear attribution to Wondersandtales is enough; a whole scene is not a quotation, it is a taking.
Reading aloud, groups and republication
You may read a Wondersandtales story aloud to a private group — a household, a small reading circle, a class that is not being charged a public ticket — provided you say where the story came from. Attribution in that setting is the title, the year 2026, and the name Wondersandtales. You do not need to write for permission first. If the group is five readers or more and you want a reduced rate on the plans, the process is on the plans page; write to me and I will set it up by hand.
A public performance, a paid event, a radio or podcast reading, a stage adaptation, or a translation offered as a separate work needs my written permission before it happens. I often say yes to a careful request and almost never say yes to a surprise. Send the request to hello@WondersAndTales.eu with the title, the date, the size of the audience, and whether money will change hands. I answer those letters from the reading desk during the hours above.
Republication is not allowed. That includes printing a story in a magazine, posting the full text on a blog, folding an instalment into a newsletter you send to your own list, and offering my illustration as a separate plate. If a journal wants to reprint a piece, they must ask, and I will talk to them directly. Gift reading is welcome; passing the files along as if they were yours is not.
Hosting, delivery and availability
The site is hosted in the European Union. Sunday sending is timed for 07:00 SGT. I cannot promise that every mailbox on earth will treat that hour the same way.
I take care over delivery, but e-mail travels through networks I do not run. If an instalment lands in spam, mark it as wanted and write to me; I will resend that week’s story. I also keep a plain-text version of every sending for readers who need it, and every illustration carries alt text. Those practices are part of the service, not extras I can withdraw without saying so here first.
The archive for paid readers is available while the relevant plan is active and, for the annotated catalogue, for as long as that plan continues. If I must take the site down for maintenance, I do it in a short window and I say so from the desk when I can. I do not guarantee unbroken access every hour of every day. A failure of hosting, of DNS, or of an upstream mail service is not a breach that unlocks a refund inside a period already begun, though I will always resend a missing instalment.
Stories are not posted on paper. Reader post is welcome at the Telok Ayer address, and I read what arrives, but I do not run a print fulfilment line and I will not post a story back to you in an envelope. If a year of weekly fiction is later collected into a book, that book will be offered on its own terms; this subscription does not automatically include a printed volume.
Changes to these terms
I may change these terms as the subscription grows. If a change affects billing, cancellation, or the licence you have to read the work, I will send a note to the address I hold for you at least fourteen days before the change takes effect. Continuing to receive stories after that date means you accept the new wording. If you do not accept it, you may cancel before it begins, and the current period will still run to its end.
Small corrections — a clarified sentence, a repaired link, a tighter description of a plan already on the site — may go up without a separate letter. I will still date the page 2026 for as long as that is the year these terms belong to. I will not use a change of terms to introduce a charge for The Sampler, and I will not use it to claim a right I have already said I do not have, such as selling your address.
Singapore law governs these terms. If a disagreement cannot be settled by a plain letter to the desk, the courts of Singapore have jurisdiction. I would rather settle a disagreement by writing than by a claim, and most questions about plans, delivery and permissions can be answered from the contact page. Manuscript feedback, collaborations and guest posts are outside what I can help with; billing, delivery and permissions are inside it.
Wondersandtales publishes original fiction; names, places and events in the stories are invented or reshaped, and any resemblance to real persons is not intended. That line is not decoration. It is how I keep the work honest while still drawing on folk material, port records and street hearsay. You read the stories as fiction, even when an endnote points at a real shelf or a real quay.
If something here is unclear
Write to the desk. I would rather explain a sentence than leave you guessing at it. Use the form on the contact page, or send a letter to hello@WondersAndTales.eu, and say which plan you hold if you hold one.