Polytical launches “Ask Polly”, a new poly advice column!

We’re pleased to announce Polytical’s first regular feature: an advice column, ‘Ask Polly’!

We’d like to invite readers to send in poly-related questions – anything and everything is absolutely welcome, and we’ll do our very best to offer some advice! You can contact Polly by email, on polly at polytical dot org, via the Polytical twitter (write to @Polyticalorg and use #askpolly) or via the Polytical Facebook page. If your question or problem is really long and complicated, that’s fine: write as much as you like, but we also ask that you include a two-line summary. Polly might also summarise it herself, and if it’s complex, it might be separated into two or three questions. The column will be published every two weeks, starting in January!

Hang on. Who is Polly?

Polly has scarlet hair, big green glasses and is made almost entirely of cats. She likes swimming with sharks (they like it too), extreme haberdashery and surreptitiously electronic-tagging journalists.

Polly has a not-so-secret alter ego as one of Polytical’s regular contributors. Her secret will probably come out sooner or later. She’ll be bottomlining answering your questions, but she’d also prefer there not to be just one line of advice, and so she’ll also be soliciting help via Facebook and Twitter, asking friends and hoping to publish several different viewpoints and ideas every episode. If you’d like to guest-post as Polly, that’d be fabulous – just email in!

Why should we take your advice?

Polly has no professional qualifications whatsoever. She’s been poly for a few years, struggles with it sometimes, overthinks it a whole lot and has amassed quite a bit of knowledge and opinion informally. There’s nothing to suggest you should especially take her advice, but it’ll provide another view that you can take into account, alongside others. Essentially, Polly decided to run an advice column because she fancied having a go at it! She’d love to run guest posts and collaborations: get in touch!

Wait a minute. I heard that one of the Polytical team was thinking about writing a book. Is this column just a way to sneakily solicit material for that?

It’s true that someone’s thinking about a book soon, and no, this is definitely not a way to get juicy material: that’d be really unethical. Getting material for the book would involve things like talking face-to-face, signing a consent form, having a long conversation and using a dictaphone. Sending questions to Polly involves none of those things. If the book’s writers try to steal Polly’s stuff, she’ll go after them with a baseball bat.

Your advice is rubbish. My two-year-old hamster could do better than that.

Polly wants to encourage people to join the conversation: she’ll be asking for help via Twitter and Facebook, and it’d be great if people also left their views in the comments. The more opinions, the better! If you or your hamster would like to guest post as Polly, that’d be great – just email in!

Who is writing this FAQ? This is really confusing.

Polly is. It’s really confusing for her too. She’s looking forward to not having to write in third person anymore. Send her questions!