“I love that you pretty much abandoned your blog and came back at full force, only to dedicate most of it to PayPerPost. Way to sell out, Heather.”

Dear Anonymous Poster from New Jersey,

Firstly, I would like to commend you on your comprehension of what constitutes a question. I can only assume that this is some sort of “free verse” inquiry, since generally questions are punctuated with that nifty little thing called a “question mark” An example:

Statement: You don’t understand.

Question: You don’t understand?

That was easy right?

Alright, now onto the meat of your complaint. I didn’t “abandon” my blog. I closed it temporarily due to some personal concerns, in this case, a father who doesn’t understand boundaries. I was very open about how and why I was leaving, and while the blog was down, I certainly wasn’t away from the internet completely or forever.

Secondly, with a space that I pay for, it’s impossible to “sell out”. I have never set out a pretense of any sort for FoS. It is my website. Like I’ve said before, I didn’t wake up one morning and want to “blog” in the bastardized sense of the word. I opened a site with a certain focus, and an open-ended idea. Right now FoS isn’t what it originally set out to be, but that’s okay. It’s evolving, just like I am.

To run a site to anyone else’s standards of what is normal or expected is wrong under any circumstances. The greater population of this tiny bubble of the internet isn’t going to dictate what I write about or how I write about it. FoS has never been my personal writing space, and anyone who thinks that by reading the site they somehow know me is dead wrong. Those of you internet people that are close and important to me know it and are involved in other parts of my life. I run FoS for myself and no one else.

The fact of the matter, when it comes to advertising, is that there are advertisements everywhere. If you pick up the NY Times tomorrow to get your daily dose of current events and OpEds, you will see that they are flanked by panels selling watches, books, designers, and ideologies. If you go out and buy a Coach bag, Nike sneakers, or Chanel sunglasses, you are advertising a product and pulling in revenue for the company to whom you’ve just shelled out your hard-earned money. The phones we use, the bags we carry, the cars we drive, it’s all a form of advertisement, and I don’t see you calling out anyone with an iPod for being a corporate “sell out”

Finally, and most importantly, is the fact that instead of addressing me like a fellow adult, you opted to misuse a function of my site and start a scene anonymously. Where I might have respected your opinion as a reader of my work if you had signed a name to your concern, the fact that you won’t take credit for your diatribe really diminishes the credibility you might have had.