Last week’s poll has closed and the results are clear: there’s more than enough interest to begin a new monthly Q&A / “Ask Me Anything” feature. You have until next Monday, December 11 to get your questions in for the first feature, which will be posted on Thursday, December 14.

The Poll Results

1. Are you interested in a monthly Q&A / “ask me anything” feature on Under the Ancient Oaks? 291 people responded. 283 said yes, 6 said no. The overwhelming margin is meaningless – most people who aren’t interested simply ignored the poll. I was looking to see if there was enough interest to make it worthwhile. I didn’t have a specific number in mind, but 283 is more than enough. So we’re going to start the feature.

2. Would you submit a question for a Q&A / AMA feature? 55% said yes, 45% said no. This was another case where I was checking to see if there’s enough interest. If only three people said they’d submit a question, there would be no sense in doing it. 159 yes votes is more than enough.

3. Would you prefer Q&A / AMA in text or in video? 87% prefer text, 13% prefer video. So we’ll do it in text. That’s probably best – I’m a better writer than a speaker, and I’m already doing the monthly video series.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the poll!

The Process

You can ask a question three ways.

1. Leave it in the comments to this post. Comments in other posts are part of that conversation and I may not see them. Leave them here, at least for the first edition.

2. Send a message on Facebook.

3. Send an e-mail. I’m not going to put my e-mail address in this post for the spambots to scrape up (again), but some of you have it and it’s not hard to find (hint: it’s in my Facebook profile).

Let me know if you want me to use your full name, your first name, or if you’d prefer to remain anonymous. If you don’t say anything, your question will be unattributed.

The Responses

I’m not going to make any hard promises (because I don’t know what this will look like until we actually start doing it) but my intent is to respond to every question. Some may be short private responses. Some may be references to previous blog posts. After nine years of blogging, I’ve written on a lot of topics. And, as in the past, some questions will end up as a stand-alone blog post.

But my intent is to answer most of them in a Q&A / AMA post. If there are too many, I may hold some till the following month. Again, I don’t know what this is going to look like until we get started.

Needless to say, troll questions will be ignored. The vast majority of Under the Ancient Oaks readers are genuinely interested in the kind of Paganism and polytheism I write about, even if we don’t always agree on everything (or in some cases, on much of anything). But lately there have been more trolls and sea lions – I’m not going to waste any more time on them than it takes to hit the delete button.

Thank you for your feedback!

Again, thanks to everyone who participated in the survey. Mainly, though, thanks to everyone who’s interested in this. I would write even if no one read any of it (writers have to write or they go insane… or in some cases, they go more insane) but it’s a lot more fun when blog posts are less monologues and more conversation starters.

Get your questions in by next Monday for the first Under the Ancient Oaks Q&A feature.