Last Friday was my last day at the studio. Ten years, give or take a month. I handed in my badge and my laptop at the front desk, and the woman who checked me in on my first morning, who has outlasted three reorganizations and most of the people who ran them, said, "Well, you're not the first." Then she hugged me, which she has never done, and I cried in the parking garage, which I had promised myself I wouldn't.

I don't want to write a post about what's wrong with big studios. I loved a great deal of it. I learned to write there. I wrote hundreds of quests, a few I'm proud of, and one, about a man looking for his brother's grave, that people still write to me about. I worked beside people who are better at this than I'll ever be. Some of them read this. Thank you.

But a game that size is a city, and you write one street of it. For a long time I've wanted to make something small enough to hold the whole of: something where it feels like there's someone on the other side. Not a script that branches. Someone paying attention. I've been saying that out loud for about a year now, mostly to Owen, mostly late, and at some point he stopped telling me why it couldn't be done and started telling me how.

So we're leaving together, to make one thing. Owen kept the studio's servers standing up for most of the years I was there, and we've been arguing in hallways since the week we met. He builds. I write. We have savings that will last about as long as we think the game will take, which we both know means they won't.

We're doing it in Duluth. I grew up here, my mother is still in the house I grew up in, and a room with a door costs less here than a parking space did in Seattle. Owen says he came for the lake. He came because I told him there was a print shop downstairs and he likes the smell. We signed for one room up a flight of stairs on Tuesday. It has two radiators, and no two days are they the same temperature.

I drove out with everything I own in a car I should have sold. Three days, four audiobooks, one bad motel in Montana. I stopped at the lake before I stopped at my mother's, and I'm not sorry.

I'm scared, which seems right. Everything I've made that was worth anything scared me first.

What would you make if no one could tell you it wouldn't fit?

I spent the weekend on the floor of my apartment with eleven shoeboxes, which turns out to be what ten years of letters fill.

I'd never counted them. I keep every letter I get, and answer every one, and for years they've gone into boxes on the closet shelf, a box a year, with the year written on the lid. I didn't know that was my mother's habit until I wrote about my father in September. This weekend I took them all down, because they needed packing, and you can't pack a letter without reading at least the first line.

So: my mother's, by far the most, nearly every week since 2014, on the blue paper she buys in packs of two hundred. Ruth Ann's, one every December since 2017, a cardinal on the front and the weather in Columbus and in Lancashire inside, the second secondhand. Kristin's, mostly cards, mostly late, all funny. Birthday cards from Priya, who draws on the envelopes. Two letters from Owen, written the same week he was sick, both entirely about a server. And a box of their own for the letters from strangers, people who wrote to me about a quest, because those always feel a little as if they belong to someone else and I'm only keeping them.

What surprised me was how much of my own life is in there, seen from outside. I don't keep copies of what I send. But you can read the letters someone wrote back and see the shape of what you must have said. "I'm sorry the move was hard." "You sound tired." "I knew they'd see it, congratulations." My half of ten years is in those boxes in negative, like a footprint in snow.

I packed them carefully, with tissue paper, which is excessive, and labeled them, and stacked them by the door, where they make a small wall I walk around to get to the kitchen.

What do you keep, when you can't keep everything?

Not my biggest reading year. Work was heavy, and since October a lot of my evenings have gone to writing instead. Thirty-one books, by my notebook's count. These are the ones I'd hand you.

• Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus. Kristin told me to, in the comments last New Year's Eve, and did not ask. A chemist in the early sixties ends up hosting a cooking show on television and teaching chemistry through it. Kristin was right, and I've told her so in writing, so she can frame it.
• Small Mercies, Dennis Lehane. South Boston in the summer of 1974, and a mother looking for her daughter. Furious, and very good.
• All the Sinners Bleed, S. A. Cosby. A Black sheriff in a small Virginia county, and a killer the county would rather not look at. I read it in two nights and slept badly both.
• The Last Devil to Die, Richard Osman. The fourth Thursday Murder Club, and the saddest. I cried on the bus, which the bus is used to.
• Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers. A reread, a year and a half after the first time. Harriet Vane goes back to Oxford for a reunion and finds a poison pen loose in her old college. I came away with a different answer to her question this time, which I suspect will keep happening.
• The Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie. The first Miss Marple, narrated by a vicar who would like everyone to stop dying in his study. My mother considered it a gap in my education and closed it by mail.
• Tom Lake, Ann Patchett. A mother tells her daughters about the summer she was an actress, while they pick cherries in Michigan. Quiet, and very nearly perfect.
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. My every-other-year reread. I read it for the company of its detective more than for the plot, and every time he's better company.
• Slow Horses, Mick Herron. Spies who've failed, exiled to a building that smells. Funny in a way that hurts a little.

What did you read this year that I should have?

I'm deciding something. It's big, and it isn't only mine to decide, so I won't say what it is. But I've been at it for weeks, and this is where I've always come to think, so here I am, thinking around the edges of it.

My mother has a rule for decisions, the way she has rules for letters. Write down what you'd do if you weren't afraid. Then write down what you'd do if you weren't hopeful. If the two lists match, you've already decided, and you're only waiting for permission.

I made the lists on Thanksgiving, on the back of a receipt. They match. I've looked at them every day since, the way you'd check a stove you know is off.

What I didn't expect is how calm it is once the lists match. The fear is still there, but it's moved. It isn't about whether anymore. It's about how, and when, and how to tell the people I care about, some of whom read this. That's the part I'm turning over now. I've been walking a lot. I've walked to Volunteer Park and back in the dark three nights this week, drafting a letter in my head each time, and none of the drafts is right.

How did you know, the last time you decided something that changed your life? Was there a moment, or did you look up one day and find you already had?

The rain came back this month, the way it does in Seattle: not as an event but as a change of address. One week it's September and the light lies gold on the lake, and the next it's the gray that will last until about April, and everyone on the bus is wearing the same jacket.

The clocks go back next Sunday. I'm already living as if they had. I'm home from the studio by six, and by then it's dark, and the evening stretches out in front of me in a way it hasn't since spring.

I've started writing at night again. Not for work. Before anyone paid me to write, I wrote at night because that was the time I had, after whatever job was paying the rent, at a desk made of a door laid across two filing cabinets. I'd forgotten what it's like to write something no one asked for. Nobody's waiting for it. There's no milestone. If it's bad, nobody will ever know, and if it's good, nobody will know that either, for a long while.

I won't say what it is. It's too young, and I'm superstitious. But most nights now I make a pot of tea at nine, turn off the overhead light, and sit at the kitchen table with the lamp and the rain, and write until the radiator stops ticking, which is the building's way of telling me it's eleven.

Volunteer Park is full of leaves. I walked through it this afternoon and it smelled like wet paper. The conservatory's windows were fogged from the inside, and a man was sitting on the steps of the water tower eating an apple very slowly, as if it were a job.

Do you make anything nobody's asked for? When do you find the time?