The other day, longtime commenter Arwen noticed something:

HEY, SNARKYSMACHINE HAS A BLOG!

Oh, sorry. I got a bit excited there.

We did, too, when we first found Snarky’s blog, and after a couple of weeks of reading that and her smart, hilarious, ass-kicking comments here, we started wondering if she’d ever consider blogging for Shapely Prose. Unfortunately, we also read the “about” section over at her blog, which says:

Having been burnt out on online activism, ally jockeying, ally cookie distribution and watching the snoozefest which is oppression olympics, Snarky pretty much seeks to avoid attracting that kind of thing to her current blog. So please spare her your critiques of her politics, language or viewpoints, as she probably wrote theory behind your critiques on the internet two billion years ago.

And we thought, yeeeah, it figures we’d never get that lucky.

But then she kept being fucking awesome, and we finally decided nothing ventured, nothing gained. So we actually asked if she would ever consider writing for Shapely Prose, and Shapelings, SHE SAID YES! We have a new blogger!

Snarky’s been waiting patiently for two days while Fillyjonk drew the icon and I finished writing the mammoth post that went up right before this, though she’s already moderated a few comments for us, BLESS HER FUCKING HEART.

Now all that’s left to do before she starts gracing this place with her fabulousness is add her bio to the “About” page here:

Snarky’s Machine is a writer, storyteller, blacademic and rabid Barney Miller fan who wrote her first short story at the tender age of nine. She can’t recall the specifics of the story, but it rocked. Currently, she writes grants and presents workshops on a host of pop culture-y, diversity and writing topics and doesn’t mind being paid in delicious cupcakes. (Sometimes.) Her work has been featured in Bitch and couple of other places she can’t actually remember. Snarky received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in 2007 and can be contacted at snarky@snarkysmachine.org.

Welcome, Snarky’s Machine! We could not be more thrilled to have you.

Hey, look! New template!

I was just going to change the header, as I’ve been promising to do since A Sarah joined us IN MAY, but then I realized I was really sick of looking at the old template. And hey, speaking of A Sarah having been here SINCE MAY, I also finally added her to the About page. Since I’m on a roll, I think it’s a good time to announce a few other changes around here.

Basically, the reason I hadn’t gotten around to changing the header or making it obvious that A Sarah is now part of the SP bloggerfam is the same reason at least 50% of my posts over the summer started with, “Hey, sorry I haven’t been posting!” As you already know, I got seriously fucking busy. And unfortunately, so did all of the other bloggers. And it hasn’t really let up for any of us.

So here’s Change #1: We will no longer be apologizing for not posting more often.We’re sick of writing it, you’re sick of reading it, and it doesn’t make content magically appear. It just makes us feel guilty and you feel… sick of reading it. So our official posting schedule from now on will be: We post when we can, period. Which is pretty much what it’s always been, actually, it’s just that “when we can” has become much more infrequent — and now, instead of trying to convince ourselves or you guys that we’ll go back to daily posting at some point, we’re just going with the flow.

Change #2: I am probably going to become strictly a weekend blogger. This is a good news/bad news thing. The bad news (if you’re inclined to see it that way) is: fewer posts from me. The good news is, that’s because I’ve actually gone and achieved the goals I set when I started this thing. Thanks to this blog (and the amazing support of Shapelings), I’m now in a position to get paid for writing elsewhere. Since the beginning of September, I’ve been doing 2 days a week at Broadsheet, 3 days a week at Jezebel, and various other freelance work. Which means, wonder of wonders, I have been functioning as a full-time writer. For money! (Not much of it, but still!) The Jezebel gig isn’t permanent at this point, but next month, I start a college speaking tour, and I’m trying to get book #2 together, so I have no idea when or if things are going to slow down. And frankly, the whole getting-paid thing means I’d rather they didn’t.

So realistically, I’m only going to have time to blog here on weekends. And some weekends, I won’t even have time to do that. It sucks, because I miss you all, and I hate not being able to hang out here every day. But I also really like getting paid to write — and sometimes writing about subjects other than fat, even! So that’s all I can tell you. If you want to keep track of where else I’m writing, I’ve started a new Twitter account, katepubs, where I will make note of any new publications — I’ve added that to the right sidebar here under “Kate, elsewhere.”

Change #3: When I redid the site, I hid the blogroll. My logic was, 1) it’s unwieldy, and I never update it anyway; 2) the fat blogs are already covered by the fatosphere feed; 3) does anybody really pay attention to blogrolls anymore? If anyone has strong feelings about seeing the blogroll return, I’ll certainly listen, but at this point, I feel like blogrolls are kind of more clutter than they’re worth; I don’t think they serve the same community-building purpose they used to.

Change #4: You can now access this site via shapelyprose.net. At the moment, it just redirects to kateharding.net, but eventually, I’d like to switch over completely. So, you know, get ready for that.

That’s it for now.  You can consider this an open thread. And thank you, as always, for reading!

Update: Are you ready for this? I also finally finished the FAQ! Or, well, finally got one up — it’ll probably change over time. For those wondering what happened to “Don’t You Realize Fat Is Unhealthy?” it’s now the first link in the first answer.

FINALLY, A MAJORITY OF THE SP BLOGGERS ARE IN THEIR THIRTIES! (Suck it, Fillyjonk.) You know the drill, Shapelings — champagne, baby donuts, dirty limericks and lots of love for Sweet Machine, who has been making this blog better (as has FJ, who can stop sucking it now) for TWO DAMN YEARS this month. Happy birthday, lady!

Update: One other thing I want to make perfectly clear, because I’m seeing this coming up a lot: We Are the Real Deal is not sponsored by Dove. It is a grassroots project, and nobody’s getting paid. MamaV approached Dove about sponsoring the panel at BlogHer — which still did not mean anybody got paid, just that Dove put money into promoting it. As part of that deal, we all agreed to put links to Dove on our blogs right before and after the conference, and there was a similar one at WATRD when it launched. That is the full extent of what I’ve done to promote Dove as part of my brief involvement with WATRD. Dove had no input into the content of the panel and is not sponsoring the blog.

Meanwhile, I’m not only seeing claims that the blog is Dove-sponsored, but seeing it characterized as “astroturfing.” That is utter bullshit, and it is incredibly not cool for people to keep spreading that lie. Feel free to criticize the content all you like, and criticize me for getting involved at all, but calling it “astroturfing” suggests that we secretly took money from Dove to promote their products while pretending to be blogging as usual. That is simply false, and incredibly insulting. I’d love to get paid for blogging, believe me, but I would never take money to fucking lie. If you’ve been running around the internet saying that WATRD is Dove-sponsored, let alone that it’s fucking astroturfing, please do your best to correct those falsehoods. Thanks.

So naturally, when I’m offline for most of two days, blog drama happens.

If you didn’t see my tweet yesterday, I have officially quit We Are the Real Deal.

What I didn’t add is, I officially quit days ago, and you’ll note I haven’t posted there in a few weeks. I didn’t just walk off in a huff yesterday. Quite honestly, my main reasons for leaving were that I already did not have time to keep up with what was going on there, and I’ve got a full-time job opportunity on the horizon which, if it pans out, will make that pretty much impossible.

But yes, I was terribly disappointed by the post yesterday, and that inspired me to make a quick announcement about my leaving, because I did not want to give the impression that I endorsed it. And yes, I’ve been uncomfortable with other elements of the content, and with the decision not to moderate comments. Since my time is becoming even more limited, engaging with hostile commenters and further discussing concerns with contributors behind the scenes is just not feasible, so the only choice was to leave.  As I feared I might need to from the beginning.

New Contributor Miss Lori posted a great comment that pretty much sums up how I feel, which you can read (along with a snapshot of what went on) over at BFD. As I just said to all of the contributors in an e-mail, I hope that these growing pains are part of building an inclusive, empowering site. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to be as active as I’d like to be in shaping that vision, and in the meantime, I don’t want my silence to be taken as agreement with everything that goes up there.

That’s pretty much my last word on the matter, and I’m going to be offline all afternoon.