Ladies and gentlemen, readers and fellow writers: I have an admission to make. I am a recovering A Tale in the Desert (ATITD) addict. My addiction took many weeks to break - weeks of cold night sweats and evenings of nail biting.

And you think I'm being dramatic.

I first realized my problem in the winter of 2004. My character was one of the leading researchers on botany and the crossbreeding of flowers. We were finally reaching some groundbreaking insights and new, well-bred flower bulbs were in greater demand than ever. I found myself setting an alarm to wake myself up every two hours, so I could get online to fertilize my prized garden.

This behavior went on for two or three weeks. In a blurry haze of disrupted sleep, I clicked hundreds of flowers, and during the day I would mass-produce fertilizer at the alchemy bench. My Excel chart of flowers grew to 363 lines of color-coded information, recording flower bloodlines and appearances, and plans for the future.