It's twelve years this month since my father died. I was at college in Minneapolis, and my mother called in the middle of an afternoon, which she never did, and I knew before she said anything. I don't write about him often. I'm not sure I know how. But I want to write about his watch, because I'm wearing it.

He was an engineer on the ore boats, the long lake freighters that carry taconite from the docks at Duluth and Two Harbors down the lakes to the steel mills. He worked in the engine room, below the waterline, in a heat and a noise I only saw once, on a tour when I was nine, and have never forgotten. On the boats the day is cut into watches: four hours on and eight off, around the clock, for weeks at a time. He stood the same watch for years. When he was home, he still woke at the hour it started, and went downstairs, and made coffee nobody else was up to drink.

The watch itself is nothing special to look at. Plain steel, a black face, a crystal with a scratch across the six. It winds by hand. He bought it in his first season on the boats, at nineteen, from a jeweler on Superior Street, and wore it every day afterward, on watch and off. Every morning he was home, he wound it at the kitchen table before his coffee, twenty turns, never more. It lost about a minute a week, and on Sundays he set it right by the radio. He used to say an engineer who couldn't keep his own watch running had no business near an engine.

After he died, my mother gave it to me. It was far too big for my wrist, and for years it sat in a drawer, wrapped in a handkerchief of his, because I couldn't decide whether wearing it would be the right thing or the wrong one. Two years ago I took it to a watchmaker downtown here, an old man with a loupe on a string, and he cleaned it and put it on a smaller band and told me it was a good honest movement and would outlast me. So I wear it now, most days.

I wind it every morning at my own kitchen table. Twenty turns. It still loses about a minute a week. On Sundays I set it right by my phone, which he would have found very funny.

There are boats here too, of course. Container ships in Elliott Bay, enormous and patient. He taught me to read the load line on a hull, to tell how heavy a boat is riding, and I still check every one I pass, out of a habit I didn't know I'd kept until somebody asked me what I was looking at. They aren't his boats. But I look.

It's Sunday, so I set it tonight. It had lost fifty seconds this week, near enough. I put the minute back, and it's on my wrist while I write this, ticking slightly too slow, the way it always has.

On Tuesday the game I've been working on for most of the last four years came out. I still won't name it here, partly out of habit and partly because the studio would rather I weren't the person who does. If you know, you know. If you don't, it's a big one, and I wrote a lot of its small parts.

There's a moment at launch when the thing stops being yours. For four years it lived on our machines. We knew every crack in it. Then on Tuesday morning it went out, and by Tuesday night more people had played it than everyone I've ever met put together, and none of them knew where the cracks were, and none of them cared. I slept for eleven hours on Wednesday. I'm told that's normal.

Since then I've been doing something I promised myself I wouldn't, which is watching strangers play.

It's a strange way to meet your own work. People stream themselves playing and talk the whole time, and you can sit there in the dark and watch them walk into a quest you wrote in a gray week two winters ago. They don't know you're there. They talk over your best lines. They skip the dialogue you rewrote nine times. They laugh at things you didn't mean to be funny, and then, now and again, at something you did, and the relief of that is out of all proportion.

And sometimes they go quiet. On Thursday night I watched a woman in Ohio play a quest about a father and a debt, and at the end she said nothing for about ten seconds, which on a stream is a very long time, and then she said, "Okay. Okay," and went to make tea. I closed my laptop and walked around the block twice.

Then there's the blacksmith. A man streaming from somewhere in Germany walked up to his forge, bought a sword, and got the second line, the advice that's slightly too specific. He stopped and said, in English, "That's weirdly specific, man." His chat filled up with people telling him to leave the blacksmith alone, he's sad. I don't know how they knew. I didn't put the sadness in that line. I only put it underneath.

A few lines from the quest that was cut last October turned up in another one, sanded down, the way I said they might. Someone has already quoted one on a forum. They don't know it came from somewhere else, and I'm not going to tell them.

I'm proud of it. I'm tired. I'd like to sleep for another eleven hours and then start the next thing.

If you've ever watched a stranger use something you made, what did you want to tell them?

It's after eleven on a Saturday night and I just got in from work. That's been the shape of things for five weeks, and it will be for a few more. The game ships this summer, and the last stretch before a game ships looks the same at every studio I've heard of: long days, weekends, dinner out of paper boxes on a conference table, and the bug count on a screen in the hallway going down, and up, and down.

I'm not going to complain, quite. I knew it would come. I chose it, more or less, the way you choose the weather by choosing a city. And there are good parts: a whole floor of people working on one thing, jokes that only make sense at one in the morning, and a bowl of clementines that has started turning up on the front counter every evening. Nobody has owned up to it. Thirty tired people take one on the way out every night, and none of us has asked.

But I haven't read a book since May. My laundry has formed a government. On Wednesday I fell asleep on the late bus home, and the driver woke me at my stop, because he knows my stop now, which is either very kind or a sign of something.

A few more weeks. Then I'm going to sleep for a while, and walk somewhere with no destination, and write here about anything else.

Volunteer Park is a short walk from my apartment, uphill, which is how you know you're on Capitol Hill: everything is uphill, both ways. I go most Sundays when I'm not working. I've been going for four years and I haven't run out of it.

The conservatory first. It's a Victorian glasshouse, white-painted iron and a great many panes, more than a hundred years old, and inside it's always a different season from the one outside. There's a room of palms and a room of ferns and a room of cactus that smells of warm dust, and that last one is mine. On a gray Sunday in February you can stand in the cactus house for half an hour and come out believing in summer.

Then the loop. Past the reservoir, where people sit on the grass and pretend it's a lake. Up the water tower, if my legs are willing, round and round the stairs inside to the windows at the top, where you can see the whole city laid out and the mountains behind it on the days the mountains are in. Past the art museum, which has been shut behind fences for over a year for its renovation, so the big black stone ring out front stands on its own, framing the Space Needle for anyone who finds the right spot. Along the edge of the cemetery next door, where once or twice a month someone will stop me and ask, a little sheepishly, which way it is to Bruce Lee.

And the crow man. He's there most Sundays, an old man in a tweed cap on the same bench above the reservoir, with a paper bag of peanuts in the shell. The crows know him. They're waiting on the wires before he arrives, a dozen or more, and when he comes up the path they drop down and follow him in short hops, like an escort. He doesn't throw the peanuts. He sets them on the bench beside him, one at a time, and they come and take them, and he talks to them the whole time in a low voice I can never quite hear.

I sat on the next bench for weeks before I said anything. When I finally did, he told me they recognize faces, which I knew, because there's been research on it at the university here and everyone in Seattle has read about it. He told me they bring him things. A button. A piece of blue glass. Once a small brass key that doesn't fit anything he owns. He keeps them in a coffee can on his kitchen windowsill.

I asked whether he'd named them. He looked at me as if I'd said something faintly embarrassing. "You don't name a crow," he said. "They'd laugh at you." Then he gave me three peanuts and told me to sit still, because they didn't know me.

I sat still. One of them took a peanut off the end of the bench, quickly, looking somewhere else the whole time, like a man pocketing a tip.

Is there someone you see every week whom you've never really met?

This week I spent two afternoons in voice sessions, which is the best part of my job and the part I have least to do with.

We record at the studio, in a small dark room with a big window in one wall. In the control room sit the voice director, an engineer, and me, in a chair at the back with a script and a pencil and instructions to speak when spoken to. Through the window is the booth, padded and close and very quiet, and in it an actor with headphones, a music stand and a glass of water, reading lines I wrote at my desk months ago.

They don't read them in order. A session goes one character at a time, and the lines come in whatever order the script was built in, so an actor might do a man's death, then his greeting, then a line about the price of rope. They have no game to look at. They have a sentence, a note from me in brackets ("tired, a little rude"), and the director telling them what came just before. And from that, in two or three takes, they make a person.

I'm there to answer questions. How do you say this place name? Is he angry or only loud? Has she met this man before? Mostly nobody asks, and that's how it should be. The director knows what she wants, the actor knows what they're doing, and I'm the person at the back who knows how the story goes and keeps out of the way.

On Thursday they recorded the blacksmith. I wrote about him last summer: four lines, one of which I rewrote eleven times. The actor was older than I'd pictured, with a voice like a door that wants oil, and he read the first three almost as I'd heard them in my head. Then he got to the fourth, the short one, and did something I hadn't thought of. He stopped halfway, for no reason in the text, and finished it more quietly than he'd started, as if he'd changed his mind about saying it and said it anyway. The director turned around to look at me. I nodded. That was the take.

That line belongs to him now. I wrote six words, and he found the place in them where the man hesitates, and that hesitation is who the blacksmith is from here on. I couldn't take it back if I wanted to, and I don't. A line on a page is a set of instructions. It isn't a person until somebody breathes into it, and whoever does the breathing has earned their share.

When I started, I used to feel a small proprietary sting when a line went somewhere I hadn't sent it. That's mostly gone. Now it's the part I wait for: the moment an actor takes something of mine, turns it a quarter turn, and hands it back better than I made it.

What's something you made that somebody else finished?