I’m tired. I’m that kind of tired where I’m not sure what I’m doing or why. I look around and wonder how my house exploded into piles of mail and dirty dishes. I wonder who authorized the purchase of dust bunnies in bulk, because I’m sure it wasn’t me. My inbox? I don’t even want to contemplate my inbox because the email has piled up in there like a monster crash on an icy, east-bound interstate. It all culminated this morning when I decided I’d snorkel in my cereal bowl. Not my best idea, but there you have it.

Some people say it’s just the consequence of surviving the holiday season. I have a hard time accepting that since I’ve lived through a range of holiday seasons prior to 2011 and survived them all. I personally believe it comes down to the writer’s lifestyle combined with the madness that defines the holidays. So what is the “writer’s lifestyle”? I’m not sure since it’s a seen-from-the-corner-of-the-eye kind of beast, but I’ll give defining it my very best shot.

The Writer’s Lifestyle (let’s capitalize, shall we?) is a vague and hungry beast that stalks a generous handful of people in the world, tagging them as functionally and openly as a blue ear tag on a  bovine does. Seriously. I can look around a writers’ convention and see opaque ear tags on about 70% of the participants. Groups move in herds, their ear tags helping as you watch the different levels of experience, dedication, intensity, genres and more break into small, self-segregated groups. It’s sort of funny to watch different tags interact, to see how they size each other up and try to figure out character motivations in real people.

The Writer’s Lifestyle is all-encompassing. Once that ear tag is on, it doesn’t come off easily. You find yourself working to accommodate it and all it stands for in an effort to convince yourself you’re on the right path. We tend to orbit our laptops and tablets and PCs as if they were the center of the world. Truth? They sort of are. Because without those things, our worlds would come to a crashing halt. We’re driven by, and wholly dependent on, technology. We watch our inboxes with rabid, unwavering focus…even if we aren’t expecting anything. One eye is always there. We carry writing materials with us more often than not and will gladly improvise if an idea hits us and we’re without paper–backs of envelopes, blank walls and bald heads are all fair game. It’s like an illness we can’t seem to kick though, in truth, few of us would want to.

What is it about the Writer’s Lifestyle that keeps us enthralled? What is it that that feeds the beast so we cling to the madness like wrestlers cling to spandex and face paint? Truly, it’s not our collective (or individual) fault.

It’s yours.

We write for you as much as, if not more than, we write for ourselves. Our stories are always rolling around in our minds and we’re always thinking of ways to pluck out the most appropriate story for the moment and get it out to the reader. You influence our choices based on your feedback, fan mail, requests, love of one character over another, and more. You push us to give you something better, stronger, more engrossing than we did last time. You, the reader, make it all worthwhile. We can handle the milk up the nose from cereal bowl snorkeling because of you. We know that, in the end, you’re what matters to us and our characters and our stories. Without you? We’d just be spinning our wheels.

So thank you, dear reader, for making it possible for those of us proudly sporting opaque ear tags and milk face to do what we love to do. Never doubt that we know just how important you are.