On Thursday a quest I loved was cut.

I can't tell you much about it. It was a side quest, mine from the first draft, about two sisters and a house that wasn't where they'd left it. It had the best scene I've written at the studio, a conversation on a staircase at night. It had a dog. It had been in the game, playable, for about four months, and people on the team would stop me in the kitchen to say they'd played it, which happens less often than you'd think.

It was cut for the reason most things are cut: time. The game has a date, the date doesn't move, and somewhere around now every project discovers it has more game than it has days. So there's a meeting. There's a spreadsheet with a row for every quest and columns for how finished it is, how much it will cost to finish, how many bugs it has and how many other things depend on it. Mine was nearly done and expensive to finish, because a house that moves is hard to build, and nothing else depended on it. That last column is the one that does it. A quest nothing depends on can be lifted out like a drawer.

Everyone was kind. The lead who told me had clearly been dreading it. He brought coffee, and he said all the true things: that it was good, that it wasn't about me, that he'd argued for it. I believe him. I've been on the other side of that meeting, for smaller things, and it's terrible from there too.

What cutting feels like, for me, isn't anger. It's a kind of quiet. I went back to my desk and opened the quest one more time and played it all the way through. I talked to the dog. I climbed the staircase. Then I closed it. It still exists, in a folder on a server, and in version control forever, which is a sort of afterlife. A few lines from it may turn up elsewhere. The staircase conversation would fit in a couple of places if I sand it down. That's what usually happens. Cut things become spare parts.

But the whole of it, the sisters and the house and the dog, nobody outside the building will ever play. About a dozen people did. I'm one of them.

I don't think writers in other forms have quite this. A novelist cuts a chapter, but she cuts it herself. Here the decision is made by the shape of the calendar. You knew going in, and it still lands like weather.

On Friday I started on the quest that will fill its slot. It's fine. It will be good, eventually. I wrote the best line from the staircase on an index card and pinned it above my monitor, which a friend at work says is morbid. I say it's a headstone, and headstones are allowed to be nice.

Have you ever had to let go of something good because there wasn't room for it?

I write at least one letter a week, by hand, on paper, with a stamp. Usually more than one. I'm told this is eccentric. I live in a city where people pay for their coffee with their watches, so I suppose it is.

It's my mother's fault. When I was growing up, every letter that came to our house got an answer, by hand, within the week. Not a card with a line in it. A letter. Thank-you notes, yes, but also the long wandering ones from her cousin in Bemidji, and the Christmas letters from men my father had sailed with, and once, memorably, a letter from a stranger who had the wrong address and wanted to know if we'd seen his dog. She answered that one too. She said it was the least she could do, and that she hadn't seen his dog.

She had rules. She still does. I've never seen them written down, but I could recite them in my sleep.

A letter that comes by hand, you answer within the week. After that it becomes a debt, and debts grow. You put the whole date at the top, day and month and year, because people keep letters longer than they mean to, and someday someone will want to know when. You answer every question they asked before you say a word about yourself. You never begin by apologizing for taking so long. Everyone takes too long, and an apology fills the first paragraph and leaves the other person feeling they were a burden, so just begin. And you end with a question, so they have something to answer. That one I seem to have taken a little too much to heart.

Who do I write to? My mother, every week, though we talk on Sundays too. She says a phone call isn't the same because you can't keep it, and she's right. A friend from college in Minneapolis, who has two kids and a nursing job and writes back on the backs of their drawings, which I prefer to stationery. A man in Two Harbors who cooked on the same boat as my father for eleven years, and who writes to me twice a year in capital letters. A woman I met at a tabletop convention years ago, who now lives in Glasgow and sends me postcards of ugly buildings. My high school English teacher, who still corrects my grammar in the margins, in green.

And sometimes people I don't know. Once you start, it's hard to stop.

Why bother? Partly habit. Partly because I spend my days writing words that will be read by a great many people I'll never meet, and it's good, at the end of the week, to write some that will be read by one person I know, at their kitchen table, with coffee. A letter is the opposite of a game. It goes to one place. Nobody can patch it.

Mostly, though, it's that a letter is slow, and I like having one slow thing in my week. You sit down. You can't delete. You think before you write the sentence, because the sentence is going to stay there, in ink, in somebody's drawer.

Who was the last person you wrote to by hand? Did they write back?

My mother has been a school librarian for longer than I've been alive, and she reads like one. That is to say constantly, carefully, and in order.

She reads mysteries above everything else, and she reads them in series order, without exception. If a friend lends her the fourth book in a series she hasn't started, she thanks the friend, puts the book on the hall table, and goes to the library for the first. I once asked her what would happen if she read one out of order. She looked at me the way you'd look at someone who asked what would happen if they ate dessert first, which is to say she knew perfectly well and wasn't going to dignify it.

She keeps a notebook. Each series gets a page: the author, the detective, the titles in order, a check mark beside each one she's read, and a line or two about it in her small square printing. Agatha Christie took three pages. Some pages are short and finished, and those are the sad ones, where the writer died and the detective stopped with them. Sue Grafton has a page with the alphabet written down the margin, checked off through X. Y comes out next month. She has known the date since spring. She has put her name down for it at the library, and she has also, I happen to know, ordered her own copy, in case.

I got Raymond Chandler from her shelves. I was fourteen and bored, and she handed me The Big Sleep and said I was too young for it, which is how you get a fourteen-year-old to read anything. I read it in a day. Then I read the rest of them in order, because I'd been raised right. I still think about Philip Marlowe more than is reasonable for a grown woman with a job.

The other thing about my mother and books is the library sale. Twice a year the library sells off what it can't keep, and my mother goes on the first morning, early, with two canvas bags and a list. She is not there to browse. She is there to fill gaps: the third book of a series she owns the first, second and fourth of, in hardcover, so they match. She will put back a perfectly good paperback and wait a year for the hardcover to come around. I have stood beside her while she did it. She was not sorry.

Growing up, I thought this was how everyone read. It wasn't until college that I met people who'd start a series wherever they happened to find it, and it took me years to stop thinking less of them. I've mostly stopped. Mostly.

This summer, with school out, she's working through Louise Penny from the beginning, on the porch, with iced tea and a pencil. She calls me after each one to tell me what she thinks of the inspector. So far she approves of him, with reservations about his choice of friends.

Do you read in order? And if you don't, what do you tell yourself?

This week I wrote a blacksmith.

He isn't important. You'll walk past his forge on your way to something that matters, and if you stop, he'll talk to you. He has four lines. One when you walk up, one if you buy something, one if you don't, and one that only plays if you come back after a particular thing has happened in his village, which I can't describe, for the usual reasons.

Four lines is not a punishment. It's a budget. Every line in a game has to be written, reviewed, translated into a dozen languages, recorded by an actor, checked, fixed and checked again, and somebody pays for each of those steps. Multiply that by thousands of people standing around in hundreds of villages and you see why the blacksmith gets four. The man who sends you on the main quest gets a few hundred. That's fair. He has a lot to explain.

But I didn't want the blacksmith to be furniture. So before I wrote his four lines, I wrote about three pages on him that nobody will ever see. He's from somewhere further south. He came here because of a woman, and she's gone now, and he stayed anyway, because by then the forge was his. He had an apprentice who left for the city and hasn't written. His left knee is bad and he doesn't mention it. He thinks the people in this village are soft, and he would die for any of them, and he would be mortified to hear himself say so.

None of that is in the four lines. All of it is underneath them.

I think about this the way I think about the men I grew up around in Duluth. My father worked on the boats, and the men he worked with could sit a whole evening at our kitchen table on about four lines apiece. You learned everything about them anyway. Who said "cold enough" like a complaint and who said it like a prayer. Who asked after your schoolwork and who asked after your mother. You learned it from the shape of what they didn't say.

So the blacksmith's first line is short, and a little rude. His second, when you buy something, is a piece of advice about it that's slightly too specific, as if he's thinking of someone else who bought one once. The third is a shrug. The fourth, the one that plays after, I rewrote eleven times. It's six words long, and I'm prouder of it than of anything else I did this month.

Most players will hear one of his lines. Some will hear two. A few people will hear all four, and of those, maybe one will stop and think, "Who was he talking about?" That person is who I write for.

How much do you think you can know about someone from four things they say?

Everyone told me, when I moved here, that Seattle people don't carry umbrellas. This is true, and after three years I understand why. An umbrella assumes the rain is coming from above. Here it comes from every direction at once, including, on bad days, up.

The news says this has been the wettest winter Seattle has ever recorded, October through April, and I believe it. I've walked through most of it, because walking is how I get anywhere that isn't work. Somewhere around February I started keeping an inventory.

There's the rain that isn't falling. It hangs in the air at the top of the hill, and you walk into it like a curtain, and twenty minutes later your coat is heavy and you can't remember getting wet.

There's the rain that comes sideways off the Sound in the afternoon, small and hard, like someone throwing rice at you from a moving car.

There's the March rain that comes down in fat, slow drops, as if it has somewhere better to be and is only here as a favor.

There's the rain that stops the moment you get indoors and starts again the moment you leave. I don't think this is a real weather pattern. I think it's personal.

And there's the rain on the bus. I take the bus across the lake to the studio every weekday, over the floating bridge, and in the mornings the windows fog so thoroughly that the whole of Lake Washington becomes a gray rumor. Someone always wipes a porthole with their sleeve. Through it you get a piece of water the color of a nickel, and a gull standing on the railing facing into the wind, looking put out. I've come to love that ride. It's the one part of the day when nobody can ask me anything.

About one day in eight there's no rain at all, and the mountain comes out, and everybody in the city looks up at the same time like a congregation.

Duluth rain is different. It comes off the lake too, but it brings the cold with it, and it doesn't hang around being atmospheric: it falls, hard, and then it turns into something else. When I was small, a wet night meant fog, and fog meant the horn on the lift bridge going every time a boat came in under it, and the boat answering with its own. My father could tell you which boat it was by its horn. I could tell you it was time for bed.

I don't miss it, exactly. But I notice I've started counting.

What's the weather where you are, and what do you call it that nobody else would?