Two weeks ago I was made a lead writer. I've been waiting to write about it until I understood what it meant, and I've given up on that, because I suspect it will take a year.

Here's what I know so far. I write fewer words of my own. I read a great many more of other people's. A month ago my day was a document with a cursor blinking in it. Now it's six documents, none of them mine, and a calendar that looks like a game of Tetris someone is losing. I spend my mornings reading drafts and my afternoons in rooms explaining why a character who says one thing in act one can't say the opposite in act three unless something happens to her in between.

I thought I'd mind. I do, a little. There's a particular pleasure in finding exactly the right line for a character at four in the afternoon, and I get it less often now. But there's another pleasure I didn't know about, which is reading a draft by someone two years out of school and finding the line they couldn't see was the best thing on the page. You point at it. You say, more of this. And the next draft is better than anything you'd have written yourself, because it's theirs.

My mother was a librarian for thirty-some years, and for a lot of them she taught children to write book reports. She used a red pencil for mistakes and a green one for the good parts, and she said the green one mattered more and wore down faster. I didn't understand that until this month. I've bought a green pen. I'm using it a lot.

What I'm still learning is when to stay quiet. A writer on the team will bring me a scene with a problem in it, and I can see the problem from the doorway, and every part of me wants to fix it. The job is to ask the question that lets them see it themselves. I am not good at this yet. Priya, who is better at it than anyone, timed me in a meeting last week: forty seconds before I rewrote somebody's line out loud. She says the target is never.

People have been very kind. Someone left a coffee on my desk the first morning with "boss" written on the lid, which I am choosing to take as affection. Owen came by, looked at my new calendar over my shoulder, and said nothing at all, which from Owen is a speech.

To anyone who's been made responsible for other people's work: what was the hardest part to let go of?

My mother flew home this morning after nine days in Seattle. It was her second visit in five years. The first was a long weekend when I'd just moved, when it rained the whole time and she spent most of it helping me put up shelves, so this time she came in September, on purpose, and the weather did what it was told.

She is sixty-four, and she climbed the stairs to my apartment every day without once using the handrail, which I know because she told me so every day. She slept in my bed and I slept on the couch, which is how she has done it in my apartments since I was eighteen, and which I have stopped arguing about.

We took the ferry to Bainbridge on the second day. She stood on the deck the whole way over and the whole way back, with her coat buttoned to the neck, and watched the city get small. She said the water was the wrong color: too green, not cold enough. She said it as if it were a defect the ferry company should know about. Then a seal put its head up near the dock and she went quiet, and on the way back she said that if she lived here she'd ride it every week just to have somewhere to go and come back from. That's the nicest thing she said about Seattle all week, and it was about leaving it.

Pike Place she loved, and wanted not to. She was suspicious of the fish throwing, which she called "theater," and stood and watched it for twenty minutes. She bought a bag of cherries she said were overpriced and ate the whole bag on a bench. She found a used bookshop down on one of the lower levels that I've walked past a hundred times and never gone into, and she was in there for an hour and came out with three paperbacks and a list of what they had shelved in the wrong section, which she very nearly handed to the man at the counter.

The Space Needle she would not go up. She looked at it from the bottom for some time, and then she said, "It looks like something that's waiting for a ride." I told her there's a glass floor at the top now, so you can see straight down. She said she'd seen down, from Enger Tower, for free, and she didn't need to pay to do it in a place that looked like that. We had coffee across the street instead and she asked me questions about my work that I couldn't answer, and was unbothered when I couldn't, because she has always understood that some things are just not yours to tell.

On the last night we sat on the roof of my building with a blanket and watched the lights come on downtown. She asked me if I was happy here. I said yes, mostly. She said that was a good answer, because people who say yes without the mostly aren't paying attention.

The apartment is very quiet tonight. She left the bed made with the corners tucked, the way she does, and a note on the pillow with the name of the bookshop on it, in case I'd forgotten.

When someone you love comes to see where you live, do you see it differently afterward?

The expansion came out two weeks ago, and with it the quest I wrote about in May, the one about a man looking for his brother's grave. I said I'd tell you a little more when it was out. What I want to tell you about, though, isn't the quest. It's the letters.

I've had mail from players before. A few times a year someone finds the studio's address and writes to say they liked a character, or hated one, or found a typo, which is fair. The mailroom keeps a tray for those, and every couple of months someone drops two or three envelopes on my desk.

This month it was a stack held together with a rubber band. Then another. The email that comes through the studio has been forwarded to me in batches with subject lines like "more for Tess." People are writing about the brother's grave quest. Not about the reward, or the fight at the end, or whether it's a bug that the lantern goes out. About their brothers. Their sisters, their fathers, a friend who drowned, a grandmother they never got to say goodbye to. A woman in Texas wrote four pages about her twin. A teenager wrote to ask whether I'd made it up or whether it happened to me, and then, in a postscript, said it didn't matter, and I think he was right.

One letter I've read more times than the others. It's from a man whose brother died a long way from home, years ago, and whose family never found out where he was buried. He said he'd played the quest at two in the morning, after everyone in his house was asleep, and that when he reached the end he sat at the computer for an hour without moving. He said he wasn't writing to thank me, exactly. He wanted somebody to know he'd been there.

I won't tell you any more of what he wrote, because it's his. But I wrote back to him on Thursday night, by hand, on the good paper, and it took me three drafts and most of a box of tissues.

My mother brought me up to answer every letter, and to answer it by hand. Her rules are simple: you write back within a week, you answer what was asked, and you say one true thing about yourself, so it isn't only an answer. I've kept to them since I was nine. I didn't expect to be keeping to them for strangers, at this rate, in July. I'm answering every one. The emails too: I write those out by hand first and then type them, which is slow and makes no sense, and which I'm going to keep doing, because it's the only way I know how to say anything that matters.

I've written hundreds of quests. Most of them people play and forget, and that's fine, that's the job. I've never had one come back to me like this. I don't quite know what to do with it, except answer.

If you've ever written to a stranger about something they made, did they write back?

My father was an engineer on the lake freighters. In the shipping season he was gone for weeks at a time, down the lakes and back, and when he called from the locks at Sault Ste. Marie my mother would hand me the phone and I'd hear the engines behind him. He said I talked too fast. I said he talked too slow. We were both right.

He'd come home smelling of diesel and coffee, sleep for most of a day, and then take me down to the canal to watch the boats come in under the bridge. He could tell you which one was which from a mile out. I never learned how.

He died in September of my third year of college. It's been almost thirteen years, and I still think of something to tell him most weeks.

Today I walked down to the water and watched a container ship go out. It was the wrong water and the wrong kind of ship. It helped anyway.

I finished a quest this week for the expansion. It's about a man looking for his brother's grave.

That's nearly all I can tell you. I've joked here before about how little I'm allowed to say about my own work, and this is one of the times it isn't funny to me. I'd like to tell you who he is, and where he looks, and what he finds. I can't, for months yet, and by the time I can, you'll be able to play it, which is better than anything I could write about it.

So here is what I can say. It's done. It went through every review it had to go through, and the people whose job is to ask whether a quest is fun asked, and someone said "fun isn't the word, but keep it," which is the nicest thing anyone has said about my work in a year. A designer built the place where it ends, and when I walked through it for the first time I didn't say anything for a while, and she didn't either.

And it cost me something. I knew it would when I started. Some quests you write from the outside: you know what the player needs to feel, and you build the steps that get them there. This one I wrote from the inside, and I can't fully explain why I went there, except that I think the work is better when you're honest, and this was the honest version. I wrote the last scene on a Sunday, in one sitting, at my kitchen table. Then I walked down to the water and stood there until I was cold.

I'm not sorry. I'd write it again. But I understand now why some writers I've worked with keep a little distance from the things they make, and I don't think I'm able to.

It will be out this summer. When it is, I'll tell you a little more.

Have you ever made something that cost you more than you expected it to?