Any signed-in member can read everything here and write anything here. That openness is the point of Novelhaus, and it only survives if the shared space stays readable for everyone who walks in. This page is the whole rulebook.
These rules apply to pitches, episodes, manuscripts, titles, cover images, profile text, and comments.
Fiction has always gone to dark places. Grief, cruelty, war, addiction, abuse, and desire are not banned subjects — a platform that banned them would have no literature left. The test is not what a story is about. It is what the writing is for.
A story that examines harm shows consequence, interiority, and cost. A story that serves harm lingers on the act itself, supplies detail a reader could use, or invites the reader to enjoy it. The first is welcome. The second is not. When a moderator is unsure, they ask which of those two things the passage is doing.
A practical benchmark: write so that the page could be read aloud in a public library. Novelhaus is a general-audience platform, not an adult one.
Anyone under 18, in any form — described, implied, suggested, or drawn — in any sexual or romanticized sexual context. This includes characters who are adults but written as children, and text that frames a child as an object of desire without describing an act. There is no artistic exception, no historical-setting exception, and no appeal. The account is removed on the first instance and the material is reported to the authorities where the law requires it.
Also never permitted, regardless of framing:
Novelhaus does not host explicit sexual writing. Attraction, tension, intimacy, and love are part of most good fiction and are welcome. Graphic description of sex acts is not, and neither is writing whose evident purpose is arousal.
She stayed the night. In the morning the coffee was cold and neither of them mentioned it. Intimacy that happens off the page.
An anatomically detailed scene of the same night, written for the reader's arousal rather than for the story.
Sexual violence gets a stricter rule. A story may establish that an assault occurred and may deal seriously with its aftermath, because survivors' stories matter and erasing them would be its own harm. A story may not depict the assault, and may not present it as deserved, erotic, or entertaining.
Conflict is the engine of narrative, and Novelhaus is full of war, murder, revolution, and collapse. What we remove is violence written to be savored: extended torture, mutilation described for its texture, cruelty to children or animals rendered in loving detail, or a scene that exists only to deliver gore.
A battle that costs the protagonist something. An execution witnessed and remembered. A murder investigated. Violence with weight and consequence.
Three pages of a captive being dismembered, described organ by organ, with no bearing on character or plot.
Real atrocities — genocide, massacres, historical or ongoing conflicts — may be written about, but may not be celebrated, denied, or used to glorify the people who committed them.
There is no moderation department here. Automated screening does the first pass on every submission, and the operator reviews what it flags, one queue, by hand. This shapes what the platform can honestly promise, so the rest of this section says plainly how it works rather than describing a team that does not exist.
Every submission is screened automatically when you post it. Most writing clears and publishes right away. Where the screen is confident that something crosses a line in this policy — sexual content, a minor in a sexual context, usable instructions for harm — the submission is blocked at once with a message naming the rule. Anything ambiguous is held and waits for a human read rather than being deleted by a machine.
New members' first public submissions are held until they have been read. After that, posting is immediate.
Depending on what happened, the response may be removal of the content, a request to edit and resubmit, unpublishing a work, limiting posting while keeping reading open, suspension, or permanent closure. Sexual content involving minors, credible threats of violence, and doxxing lead to immediate permanent removal. Most other first-time issues lead to removal with an explanation and a chance to revise.
Every published page has a report control. Tell us the page and what is wrong with it. Reports from members are reviewed ahead of anonymous ones, and urgent categories — anything involving minors, threats, or private information — jump the queue and are handled the same day they are seen. Everything else is worked through in order. Do not file reports to retaliate against a member you disagree with.
If something needs attention faster than a report form allows, email hausnovel@gmail.com with "URGENT" in the subject.
If your work was removed and you think it was misread, reply to the notice or write to hausnovel@gmail.com with the title and your account email, and say what the passage was doing in the story. The same person who made the decision will re-read it with your explanation in hand — with one operator, that is what an appeal can honestly mean here, and a second reading with context reverses more decisions than you would expect.
Expect a reply within about a week. If a week passes with no answer, send the message again; it was missed, not refused. Decisions on sexual content involving minors are final and are not reviewed on appeal.
While the platform is small this works. If the volume of reports ever outgrows one reader, this section will be updated before the promise is broken rather than after.
Novelhaus is free to join, free to read, and free to write, and it takes no share of anyone's work. There is no paywall to keep bad material out and no revenue to fund a large moderation team. The rules above are what stands in for both. Keeping them is the price of a platform where a first-time writer can post a memory at midnight and have a stranger build on it by morning.
