On the shelf above my desk there's a ship in a bottle. My father made it the winter I was born, from a kit he bought in Two Harbors, and it's meant to be the boat he worked on, though he admitted the kit was for a different boat and he'd painted the stripe on himself. It's about the length of my hand. You can see all of it at once: every rail, every hatch cover, the tiny lifeboat on its davits. No part of it is somewhere else.

I've been thinking about it a lot this winter, because I work on things nobody can see all of at once. The game I'm on is big enough that I don't believe a single person in the building has played every part of it, including the people whose job is to play every part of it. I write my piece, someone else writes the piece beside it, and we meet at the edges in a spreadsheet. That isn't a complaint. Some of the best work I've done was at those edges. But I keep catching myself wanting to make something the size of the bottle. Something one person could pick up, and turn over, and know.

I said this to Owen at lunch on Thursday, over the bad pho in the building across the street, and he gave me the reasons it can't be done, in order, which is how he gives everything.

Small isn't cheap, he said. The parts of a game that make it feel alive cost the same whether the world is a mile wide or one room. Small means every corner gets looked at, so every corner has to hold up. Small means nothing to hide behind. And the thing I actually want, which he says only sounds small, is the most expensive direction there is, because I don't want a smaller game, I want a deeper one, and deep is where the money goes.

He's right about all of it. He usually is, about money. I went back to my desk and wrote barks for a market scene, eleven of them, for a man selling eels, and they're fine. Somebody will hear two of them.

The bottle has a crack near the neck, from a move I won't describe. It's never mattered. You still see the whole ship through it.

What's the smallest thing you own that feels complete?

The year's reading, more or less in order. Thirty-four books, helped along by a lot of buses and a week in Duluth in February with not much to do but cook.

• Strong Poison, Dorothy L. Sayers. Started in January because Jonah told me to. A detective novelist on trial for murder, and a man who decides she didn't do it.
• Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers. A body on a rock on a beach, a cipher, and two people who keep almost saying what they mean.
• The Maid, Nita Prose. A hotel maid who takes everything literally finds a guest dead in his bed. Funnier and sadder than I expected, and I read it in a day.
• Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers. I wrote about it in June. It's the best book I read this year, and I suspect it will be the best book I read in several.
• Busman's Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers. The last of them, and a strange, private, tender book. A murder on a honeymoon, mostly as an excuse.
• Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel. Time travel, an airship terminal, and a pandemic novelist on a book tour. Short, odd, and it stayed with me all summer.
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin. Two friends who make video games together for thirty years. I've avoided novels about my own job for most of my life. I'm glad I didn't avoid this one, and I couldn't talk about it for a day after I finished.
• The Bullet That Missed, Richard Osman. The Thursday Murder Club's third. I'll read these as long as he writes them.
• The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers. From the first of my mother's boxes in November: a Wimsey without Harriet, the kind I'd skipped on my way to her. Church bells, a flood in the Fens, and a stranger in someone else's grave. Her slip in it says "You skipped this one."
• Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. David Copperfield, retold in the mountains of Virginia in the years of the opioids. I'm still reading it, so it counts for this year by my own rules, which I made up.

The rest were mysteries for the bus, books I read for work and can't name, and one very good cookbook I read cover to cover like a novel, which my mother says is the only way to read a cookbook.

What should go on next year's list?

I wrote the last of my cards this afternoon, at the kitchen table, with the radio on and a stack of stamps that I underestimated, as I do every year.

Seventy-one this year. That's more than usual, and I know why. After September there were a lot of people I wanted to write to who used to be twenty feet away. Most of them got a card with a real letter folded inside, because a card alone is a receipt, as my mother says, and they deserved more than a receipt.

The list, roughly. My mother, first, as always, though I'll see her in a week. Kristin's family in Minneapolis, with a separate card for each kid, because they've informed me they each want their own envelope. Priya, whose card I'll leave on her desk on Tuesday because we both enjoy the pretense that we don't see each other every day. Old friends from college. Two former teachers. A cousin in Wisconsin I've met three times.

And strangers, or people who started as strangers. A few people still write to me every year about a quest I wrote in 2019, about a man looking for his brother's grave. Three letters came this year. One was from a woman whose brother died in the spring, who said she'd played it again and it helped, and I sat with that one for a long time before I answered it. Everyone who writes gets a card. I don't think I'll ever stop being astonished that anyone writes at all.

The first card to arrive this year came from Ohio, a cardinal on snow, as it has been every December for six years. I've put it on the windowsill where I can see it from the table.

My mother's rule is that cards go out by the eighteenth, so that they arrive before Christmas even if the post office is having a bad week. I made it, just. The last ones go in the box on the corner tonight.

Who's the one person you'd still write to even if nobody wrote back?

My mother has decided to give away half her library.

She announced this on the phone in September the way she announces most things, as a decision already made and partly carried out. She is sixty-seven. She is in excellent health, as she would want me to say. She simply looked at the shelves in the den one afternoon, she told me, and realized she was keeping a great many books for a version of herself who was going to reread them, and that she'd met that woman and she wasn't going to.

So she has been sorting. Her method is exactly what you'd expect from a school librarian. Every book got a slip of paper. Keep, give, or Tess. Eleven boxes went to the library sale. A few went to her friends, by request, with notes. And six came to me, by media mail, which is the slowest way a box can travel in this country and which she chose on principle.

They started arriving on Tuesday. Each box was taped exactly square and labeled on two sides in her hand: what was in it, the date, and "Seattle" underlined, as if the post office might otherwise have doubts. Inside, every book still had its slip. Most of them say only "Tess." Some say a little more. Her Dorothy Sayers, the Gaudy Night I read in June in a library copy, says "Finally." A battered Agatha Christie says "You read this under the covers in 1996 with a flashlight. I knew."

The Chandlers aren't in any of the boxes. I asked her on the phone, a little worried, and she said they're staying on the shelf, because those are the ones I'll want when she's gone and she isn't gone. Then she changed the subject to the weather, which is how I know she'd thought about that sentence for a while before she said it.

My apartment is small and the books are many. I've had to give up a chair. The new stacks are along the wall by the window, still in their boxes, because I haven't been able to bring myself to shelve them yet. It feels like moving my mother's handwriting into my house, which in a way it is.

What's a book you've kept for a version of yourself who's never going to read it?

How long does it take to write a line of dialogue? Anywhere from four seconds to a day. On Thursday it was a day.

The line belongs to an old woman in a quest I can't describe. Earlier in the quest the player can fail her, in a way that costs her someone. Most players won't. Some will, by accident or on purpose, and then, if they go on with the quest, they have to walk back into her house and face her. The scene was written, her lines were written, all but one: the first thing she says when the player comes through the door.

Here's roughly how the day went.

At nine I wrote twelve versions, fast, without stopping to judge them. Some of them were angry. Some were cold. One was a speech, a whole paragraph about what she'd lost, which I deleted as soon as I'd read it, because grieving people don't make speeches to the person they blame. They don't have the breath.

At eleven I read the remaining ones aloud in a meeting room with the door shut, which is the only way I've ever been able to tell what's true. Most of them sounded like a writer. Two sounded like her.

At one I took a walk around the building, twice, and tried to work out what she would actually want in that moment. Not to punish the player. She's too tired for that. I think she wants them to know she saw them come in. That she isn't pretending they're a stranger.

By four I'd cut it down to six words. By five I had five. I won't quote it, because it isn't mine to quote, and because out of the scene it would look like nothing. Five ordinary words a person might say to someone who's come back. That's what took the day.

I used to feel embarrassed by days like that, as if a professional should be faster. I'm not anymore. A line a player hears once, at the worst moment of a story they chose, deserves a day. Most of my days go to lines nobody will remember, and that's fine too. It's the work. But every few months there's one that has to be exactly right, and the only way I know to make it right is to stay in the room with it until it stops moving.

Is there something you've spent a whole day on that came out looking like nothing?