Editorial Standards
How Our Unfinished Story is written.
Our Unfinished Story is a personal Life Library written by Donald Faulknor, writing as A Work in Progress. These standards explain how chapters are shaped with honesty, care, privacy, faith, reader safety, and responsible storytelling in mind.
The goal is not to sound perfect or pretend the story is finished. The goal is to write honestly about unfinished seasons while staying responsible with sensitive topics, personal stories, and the people connected to them.
Core Promise
Honest writing with clear boundaries.
OUS is built on lived experience, reflection, faith, and personal growth. Chapters may be emotional, vulnerable, and personal, but they should remain thoughtful, grounded, and safe for readers.
This site does not exist to diagnose, shame, expose, sensationalize, or offer professional treatment. It exists to help readers feel less alone and to offer language for parts of life that are still being processed.
Our Standards
What guides the writing.
These principles shape how chapters, pages, captions, and public-facing OUS content should be written, reviewed, and revised.
Written from lived experience
OUS is written from personal experience, reflection, faith, fatherhood, heartbreak, healing, rebuilding, and the ongoing work of becoming. It is not written as clinical, legal, financial, or therapeutic advice.
Personal, but responsible
The writing may be honest and emotional, but it should not expose private people unnecessarily, attack others, diagnose people, or turn pain into spectacle.
Clear about its limits
Chapters may discuss trauma, grief, heartbreak, faith, parenting, and emotional struggle, but they are personal reflections. Readers facing danger, crisis, abuse, self-harm, medical concerns, legal issues, or severe distress should seek qualified support.
Helpful before promotional
The goal of each chapter is to help readers feel less alone, find language for unfinished seasons, and move toward clarity, hope, and steadier ground before asking for anything in return.
Faith used gently
Faith is part of the story, but it should not be used to shame readers, force conclusions, dismiss pain, or make every chapter feel like a sermon.
Revised as the Life Library grows
Older chapters may be reviewed and updated for clarity, structure, reader usefulness, internal links, accessibility, search intent, privacy, and emotional responsibility.
Search clarity without losing the voice
Chapters may be shaped with clearer titles, excerpts, headings, and links so readers can find them, but SEO should never turn OUS into a generic advice site or content farm.
Reader safety comes first
When a topic touches crisis, abuse, self-harm, medical needs, legal concerns, or severe distress, the page should point readers toward qualified help instead of pretending a personal reflection can solve an urgent situation.
Authorship and Experience
Who creates the Life Library.
OUS is written by Donald Faulknor, writing as A Work in Progress. The chapters are grounded in lived experience, fatherhood, faith, personal growth, heartbreak, healing, discipline, and rebuilding.
Donald’s background includes fatherhood, martial arts instruction, teaching children, academic support for students, personal fitness training, a personal health transformation, education, creative work, and the ongoing work of becoming. These experiences shape the writing, but they do not turn OUS into therapy, medical care, legal advice, or professional counseling.
The author page provides more context about Donald’s life, background, and boundaries. That transparency helps readers understand where the writing comes from and what kind of trust the site is asking for.
Read the Author PageSensitive Topics
How difficult subjects are handled.
Some chapters discuss trauma, heartbreak, family pain, emotional reactions, fatherhood, faith struggles, grief, healing, and rebuilding. These subjects are handled as personal reflections, not as professional guidance.
When writing about painful experiences, OUS aims to protect privacy wherever possible. The focus should stay on meaning, growth, reflection, and what can be learned — not on exposing or humiliating other people.
If a topic could affect a reader’s safety or well-being, the writing should avoid giving instructions that replace qualified help. Readers in crisis, danger, abuse, self-harm risk, or severe distress should contact emergency services, a crisis hotline, a licensed professional, or another trusted source of immediate support.
Privacy Practices
The lesson matters more than the evidence.
OUS is personal, but personal does not mean careless. The writing should protect people connected to the story and avoid sharing unnecessary identifying details.
Children, former partners, family members, and private people should be protected wherever possible.
Private messages, documents, addresses, schools, workplaces, legal details, and identifying information should not be shared just to make a chapter more emotional.
The lesson should matter more than the evidence.
When a detail is not necessary for reader understanding, it should be softened, removed, generalized, or left out.
Accuracy and Updates
How the Life Library improves over time.
OUS is a living Life Library. Chapters may be updated when the writing can be made clearer, safer, more useful, more accessible, or better connected to related chapters.
Revisions may improve headings, excerpts, internal links, reader takeaways, privacy language, accessibility, search clarity, or emotional framing. Updates are part of the project because the site itself is a work in progress.
When outside sources, Scripture, or external references are used, they should support the chapter rather than distract from it. Scripture should be used thoughtfully and gently, especially in chapters about pain, waiting, grief, or healing.
Common reasons a chapter may be updated:
To make the opening clearer for new readers.
To improve headings, excerpts, links, or Continue the Story paths.
To strengthen privacy and sensitive-topic boundaries.
To add or update Scripture, resource links, author context, or reader safety notes.
To improve accessibility, readability, mobile flow, and alt text.
To connect a chapter more clearly to the larger Life Library.
Scripture and Faith
Faith should serve the chapter, not force it.
Scripture may appear in chapters when it naturally deepens comfort, hope, surrender, endurance, or spiritual reflection. It should not be added as decoration or used to rush someone through pain.
Faith language on OUS should be gentle, lived, humble, and honest. It should not shame readers, diagnose them, promise instant healing, or minimize what they are carrying.
Bible links and other external resources may be used when they help the reader continue, verify, receive support, or move safely through a topic. Internal links and Continue the Story paths remain the main reader journey.
Tools and Creative Process
Human story first. Tools second.
OUS may use tools for planning, editing, organization, SEO review, image preparation, accessibility checks, and technical website work. Those tools can help shape the page, but they do not replace the lived experience behind the writing.
The personal stories, emotional lessons, faith reflections, and Life Library direction come from Donald’s lived experience and editorial judgment. Tools may help clarify, organize, or polish; they should not invent private experiences, fabricate credentials, or turn OUS into generic content.
If AI-assisted images, captions, outlines, or editing support are used, they should serve the reader and remain consistent with the truth, privacy, tone, and purpose of OUS.
Reader Safety
This site can support reflection, but it cannot replace help.
The chapters on OUS may help readers feel seen, understood, or less alone. But this site is not crisis support, therapy, medical care, legal guidance, or professional counseling.
If you are in immediate danger, considering self-harm, experiencing abuse, or facing a medical, legal, or mental health emergency, please seek qualified help right away. Your safety matters more than finishing a chapter.
Support and Transparency
Support should never be hidden or pressured.
OUS may include ways for readers to support the writing, but support should be presented after value has been given. Readers should never feel manipulated, pressured, or emotionally trapped into giving.
Support exists to help keep the writing, website, and larger mission alive. The long-term hope is for OUS to become meaningful enough to support the work and, eventually, help give back to others.
Keep Reading
Return to the Life Library.
These standards exist so the story can stay honest, useful, responsible, and human as it continues to grow.