Starting

For nearly ten years I've written for a living, and in all that time I've published almost nothing with my name on it. That's how the job works. I write side quests for a game studio across the lake from Seattle: the small stories you find off the main road. A farmer with a missing goat. A widow who wants a letter delivered. A man who swears the well has started talking to him. Hundreds of people work on a game like ours, and my name goes in the credits, a long way down, between two people I've never met.

Last month my mother asked me, on the phone, where she could read something I'd written that wasn't in a game. She is a school librarian, and she was being precise. She has played a little of what I write, very patiently, with my old controller and the sound turned down, and she says it's lovely. She would also like to be able to read it sitting in a chair. I didn't have an answer for her. So this is the answer.

I'm going to write about whatever I'm thinking about. Books, mostly mysteries, because that's what I read. Walking, because I live on Capitol Hill and don't own the kind of car you'd want to park there. Duluth, where I grew up and where my mother still lives, a few streets up from Lake Superior. Letters, because I write a lot of them. And the work, a little, as much as I can.

Which brings me to the joke. People in my line of work learn early that there is very little we're allowed to say. I can tell you that I work at a studio. I can tell you that it makes games. I can tell you that this week I wrote a conversation between two men about a fence, that it's the best conversation about a fence I have ever written, and that you'll play it in a year or two and never know it was the one. That's about the limit. Anything more and a very nice person from legal comes to my desk with a bowl of mints and a worried face.

So when I write about the work, I'll write around it, the way you might describe a house by the shape of its yard. I suspect that will make for better posts anyway. The yard is usually where the interesting things happen.

I'll try to post every couple of weeks. My mother will be checking.

If someone you knew started writing in public, what would you want them to write about?