For twenty years the job has been the same, underneath whatever title it wore: make sure the systems no one sees keep working, quietly, exactly as they should.
The stories came the same way they always do to people who don't call themselves writers yet — told out loud first, mostly to one person, late enough at night that the ordinary rules of a sentence stopped mattering.
At some point the telling wasn't enough. This is the part where that changes — where a story someone knows by heart becomes a book anyone can pick up.