I feel like I should come attached with a disclaimer for all new people who meet me. More specifically, all the non-writers who become acquainted with me and all the occupational habits that accompany me. There ought to be some kind of warning for people unfamiliar with the peculiarities inherent within my primary mode of expression. Sometimes I feel as though we writers are not quite normal folk, and maybe there ought to be a guide to our behavior for those with livelihoods that do not comprise putting different kinds of words next to each other. 

1. I will probably mine your experiences. These might be experiences we share, or stories you tell me, or even things that almost happened to you but didn't. They might even be small things, like mannerisms, observations, an idiosyncratic method of measuring time. If interesting, poetic, beautiful things come from your life and you do not use them to make art, I will. I probably won't tell you about it. You'll probably never find out. So sorry in advance for thieving. (Hey, you weren't going to use it anyway.)

2. Sometimes I get random ideas and have to write them down. Sometimes this happens mid-conversation. It's usually nothing to do with you. It might be a sentence, a name, even just a phrase that sounds neat. These things sometimes appear in my brain without warning. If I don't get them down in my little blue book right away they tend to evaporate into the aether never to be seen again. I don't mean to be rude by jotting words down in the middle of your anecdote but this is a time-sensitive operation. No, you can't read my notes. They look silly out of context anyway. Sometimes I read them over and even I have no idea what I was getting at when I wrote them. Either way, my on-the-go notebook is a private space for spontaneous oddities that occasionally just has to be added to.

3. There are days when I have to disappear for a while. I'll be inside my skull. The cell phone reception is not very good there. The internet is spotty. But it's the best place for hammering out lots of words. There's only room for one in here and anyway, I'm not wearing pants. I'll get back to you when I crawl back out into the world. If it takes me 12 hours to reply to your text message, it's probably because I left my phone outside. Sorry. It happens. 

4. I don't work hours, I work projects. I don't always space them out as well as I should. Sometimes I've got to cancel a social engagement because I'm still at work--and will be until 3 in the morning. If you were to make a graph of my work activity, it would usually be all scrunched up against the deadline. My mind's not the most organized or regular instrument in the world. Sometimes that means I've got to skip out on fun things because I didn't plan well enough around them. My bad. I'm working on it.

5. If I'm working in public--say, a coffeeshop or another wonderful provider of wifi, air conditioning, and caffeine--and you run in to me, it doesn't always mean I'll appreciate the company. Even if you are doing work too, my personal mind bubble will have been ruptured and I'll probably spend the next couple of hours compulsively checking Tumblr and Reddit. It's nothing personal. I like you just fine. I'm just only really capable of writing when shrouded in anonymity. Write-ins can work for me when I'm in the right state of mind but for the most part I'm the solitary type when I'm hard at work.

Essentially, when I'm a jerk to you, it's probably not personal. It's just the way my idiot word-churning brain functions sometimes. What about you, fellow writers? What guidelines do you wish you could hand out on business cards to your non-writer friends?