I am typing this one-handed at 9:01 p.m. on this thunderstormy Thursday. I’m using the other hand to shove a peanut butter & jelly sandwich into my gaping maw. It is the first of a PB&J double header. I’m fucking hungry. It is, after all, 9 p.m. and I worked through dinner.

Whenever I go an entire week without updating I Will Dare I get a little itchy inside my brain. Really, the itchiness starts around day three or four. What if people are worried about what happened to me? I start to wonder. What if they miss me? I think megalomaniacally.

Of course, I know that nobody notices. I know that if anyone was really worried they could take a trip to Twitter and see every hiccup and burp I toss out there on a daily basis.

But the reptilian parts of my brain often forget that nobody cares when I last updated my website. Those parts of my brain are still stuck in the early-aughts when, if personality bloggers like me went an entire week without updating, people sent emails. Lots of people sent lots of emails to make sure everything was okay. This was really a thing that happened. Of course people also made dramatic announcements about hiatuses and quitting blogging.

Another annoying thing they’d do? They apologize for being away from the blog for so long with laundry lists of all the hectic happenings of their life.

I only have two things to tell you.

1.) I hit 100 pages on v2 of The Beast today. It’s why I skipped dinner. I vowed to myself while I was at lunch with FFJ that no matter what I was not leaving the damn chair until I hit page 100. I’m at 28,307 words right now. My goal is to finish v2 by my birthday (in 28 days).

2.) Today while leaving lunch, I made a crack about having sex with Prince Harry. I make a lot of cracks about having sex with Prince Harry. As FFJ and I parted from our hug, she reminded me that I had to watch the reality show about Marrying Prince Harry. From the bench in front of the Dog Grooming place, a woman with a blonde ponytail and tattooed arms took her cigarette out of her mouth and shouted “I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THAT.” It was awesome.

Tomorrow, remind me to tell you about my “TV Opportunity.”

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Hey, do you remember back in January when I was all high and mighty about shilling stuff? It was a post I swore I’d make disappear the minute I was going to start promoting my writing that appeared in other places.

Remember that?

Well, I didn’t take down the post but I am here to point you over to BlogHer, where the very fine editors have syndicated You are What You Post: A Warning & A Rant. In exchange for my permission they said they would give me money and ask only that I tell the readers of I Will Dare about the syndication.

I am nothing if not a woman of my word.

The post The Hypocritic Oath appeared first on I Will Dare.

First of all, the FTC can blow me. Second of all, what gets my goat is that they’re coming down on bloggers. They should also require movies and TV shows and newspapers and radio stations to reveal who is paying them to pimp stuff. Fair is fair (the makers of The Legend of Billie Jean have not given me money to quote their movie, I did that of my own freewill). Third of all, if someone gives you money to say nice things about their product on your blog, that is a paid endorsement and if you don’t disclose that, regardless of FTC rulings, you’re a sleezebag and your readers shouldn’t trust you.

In the interest of full disclosure here is a list of companies, products and/or people who have paid me or given me stuff in hopes I would say good stuff about them:

And still in that interest of full disclosure here are a list of things I’ve actually pimped because I like them that nobody gave me money for:

• Dawson’s Creek
• Peanut Butter
• Bret Michaels’ Rock of Love
• Diet Coke with Lime
• Nutter Butters
• Pens with blue ink
• Starburst Greenbag Jellybeans
• Honeycrisp Apples
• The Loft
• Grumpy’s downtown
• Rock and Roll

I’m not saying I’m above payola*. I’m just saying nobody offered me any. Because if the very nice, intelligent, and attractive people at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment wanted to send me The Complete Series of Dawson’s Creek on DVD I would take it and sing its praises on I Will Dare until either my fingers fell off or I had memorized Jen’s Mrs. Dalloway speech from the final episode.

*Okay, that really is a lie. I am above payola. I value honesty and my own integrity too much — four years of journalism school can do that to a girl.

I value it so much I always tell the MN Reads’ reviewers that even though a publisher or publicist sends them a book (and we do get quite a few free books) they’re under no obligation to like it or, if it’s that bad, to even finish reading it. Publishers and publicists (at least the professional ones) understand that, and I’m sure they’d probably be happier if the MN Reads’ reviewers weren’t so honest in their reviews. But they are, because they can be. And I’m not going to start labeling which reviews are of free books and which books each reviewer paid money for. That is asinine.

Finally, I’d just like to say, yo, Nabisco, “I Will Dare now with more Nutter Butters!” has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?

The post FTC disclosures, a list appeared first on I Will Dare.

All I remember is that for some reason you and I had discovered Rex Sorgatz’s notebook. We took it to my parents’ house and hid it. Then you and Barrett went to the grocery store to stock up on Dr. Pepper and cigarettes. And we sat in my sister’s old bedroom with all the windows open (even though it was still winter), smoking and trying to figure out what everything in the notebook meant.

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