here was no July devlog. There could have been. I could have racked my brain to actually remember what happened in July and scrape together some visuals to create something. But...that would have been backdated and somewhat of a cop-out. I feel like we have a better relationship than that.
One of the places I used to work at called it radical candor. I hate that term, and that job was weird, but ultimately they were right.
In the spirit of radical candor, I was busy partying my ass off on boats of people I barely know and being driven around in a convoy in the Gobi desert in something out of a scene from Mad Max(Fury Road edition, if we're being precise). Half of the time, I didn't have cell service, let alone wifi. The rest of the time, I was doing my best to type furiously before we hit another pothole the size of a small village and I made another typooooooo.
And yet, the product grew.
Partially because I am a bit insane (we've covered this already) and partially because time is ticking. You see competition has this really interesting way of becoming a forcing function. I quite frankly had no intention of releasing this app before 2028. (I'll pause for a moment and let that sink in.) However, tiny pieces of the app are popping up in other apps. I can't help but wonder how long it will take other people to connect the dots. Ideas are promiscuous little things. If you don't act on them, they will visit someone else.
A Troublesome Intersection
I found myself at a crossroads these past months. On one road, the desire to release great, well-designed, thoughtful software, polished until I could no longer see the seams. On the other, the uncomfortable reality that eventually other people have to touch it. That designing in a silo can only get you so far, and that some problems simply do not exist until somebody else walks into the room.
As this product becomes more real, I find myself spending more time doing market research, spying, trying to understand the landscape, and...that annoys me.
Because...I don't care what other products are doing. They had their chance. They blew it and I'm making my own software, and yet...I see why I need to care...to keep tabs on them. Sigh. Because they can teach me things, because I don't have to learn every hard lesson myself. Because they have employees and I don't xD.
Something I am quickly learning about running a business, is the number of different languages you need to speak: Productese, Designish, Programman, Marketdian, etc. just to really get your foot in the door. I cannot help but draw parallels from my own life and this product.
The problem with polishing something alone is that eventually you stop fixing the product and start fixing your own expectations of the product. I know where the buttons are and what they mean, but do you?
It's impossible not to suffer from some form of myopia. One cannot experience every single edge case, brilliant idea or bug themselves.
A pity.
I don't have a pithy solution to this problem. I did what every millennial does when faced with a crisis.
I took a trip.
Distillation
In August, I went to Mongolia. I spent two weeks in the desert during an unprecedented heatwave. 11+ days of offroading, sand dunes, camping, camels, hiking, horses, magical water, BATS, toads, and more. It was a wild experience for sure. Easily one of the more unique adventures I've been on. Something that made the trip a bit spicy was that our driver didn't speak English and we didn't speak Mongolian. Google translate is great when you have cell service. We spent the first half of the trip playing charades and discovering the universal language of humans...pointing.
the office, briefly
a baddie in her natural habitat
Currently the world is experiencing an oil crisis. We were not immune to that. We often spent several hours waiting in gas lines, hoping that there would still be gas left when we rolled up to the pump. Often there was not. On the fourth day, our driver leaned over and uttered a word, his first English word besides hello. "Distillery?" I frowned at him, thinking he had lost his mind to the heat. I racked my brains thinking about what he could have meant. I leaned back and brainstormed with the girls...Distillery...Distillery and then it hit me.
LIQUOR!!!!
He wanted to get LIT!
HELL YEAH!
Nodding enthusiastically, we roared off down the street and got a surprising distance before someone radioed on the walkie-talkie about where we were going.
Our driver turned the walkie off.
From that single word, something cracked open and the rest of the trip filled with aggressive pointing, dancing, caretaking, ice cream and general bonding. To this day, I have no idea where he got that word from, but it showed me that full translation wasn't necessary. That you could grasp the concept via fragments.
The God of the Crossroads
And yet fragments are dangerous.
Witchcraft.
You would never write like this publicly. (I'm assuming here. Are you a writer?) If so, you don't only use fragments. You use sentences, great metaphors, capitalization and questionable punctuation. And you need all of that to follow you from place to place, or app to app should you choose to move your work. Which leads us to the theme of July and August.
Importing.
The act of taking information from one place and placing it into another. This is a very sacred thing for writers. It requires a lot of trust, on both our parts. Rather like taking unfamiliar sounds and distilling them into something usable.
Writers write in a variety of formats: markdown, Word docs, notes, PDFs, Scrivener files, etc. Each one presenting its own challenges. Comments from Word and Google Docs. TABLES (seriously why are you putting tables in your prose? I guess GameLit can get a pass but the rest of you...JAIL.). Research notes and files...I'm pointing to you Scrivener.
Scrivener presents an interesting challenge because it's not just the manuscript but also a newspaper clipping and a photo of the heroine's dog. Scrivener exposed a seam that I had not thought about. Where would things go that weren't the manuscript? The notes? The outline? The other types of files? A .scriv file at best is really a zip file, with tons of information besides prose.
Import was actually the raccoons in a trench coat. I won't bore you with the details (I don't want to get carpal tunnel.) but since I have your attention momentarily, I'll paint the picture.
Import requires someplace for files to land that aren't the manuscript. Enter the vault, an entire file system. It needs navigation, design, search, a reader, etc. Then I realized that you need to connect the notes to the prose. Enter the Home Base, a way to look at your notes while writing. (That's an overly simple way to describe that feature.)
After building that, I needed to improve the library because now you have multiple books and perhaps a series, which then led to database work and ultimately prompted me to go to the desert and stare into the sun.
A Lit Path
You may or may not remember that despite all this hard work that I do on this app, I do in fact write from time to time. The main purpose of the app is to help me write. I stare at the bugs, the jank, the messiness and I do my best to write and bug fix at the same time. This is a normal occurrence for me. Write, find a bug, fix it, go back to writing.
Except something happened this month.
I was writing. 10, 100, 500 words, and I found myself...just writing. Dare I say...having fun? There were fewer bugs. Things were just working. I would take notes, and drop Placeholders[inline notes you can drop to yourself, like this one :) ] in and navigate around the app with relative ease. Entities were lighting up, I could see Wiki pages getting longer, the Home Base was populating, I was viewing two different chapters at the same time.
It felt...strange.
Because I know the app has seams, where the dead bodies are. But it was doing a damn good job at hiding them.
Somewhere between the bugs, bats and dead bodies, I realized something.
Aampersand is going to misunderstand things. Some writer is going to have their Word document formatted in some fuck-ass ways, and my carefully designed adapters are going to simply wither away.
What matters is that it doesn't pretend otherwise, and we convince you to play charades with us....That sounds like some shit you'd read in a fortune cookie.
An Unusual Pillar
The Greeks placed stone pillars called hermai at crossroads — boundary markers to guide travelers between one world and the next. Mine are a little tilted.
a crossroads, dressed up as a sunset
The friends and family launch is coming, presenting the largest crossroads we've encountered so far. To vomit or not vomit... I fear that may be the real question.
A lit crossroads
I spent two months chasing raccoons-in-a-trench-coat. Word docs, Scrivener files, PDFs — all the fragments writers bring in from other places — now have somewhere to land: a vault, a Home Base, a real library. The friends and family launch is next, the biggest crossroads yet. Join the email list to be there when the pillars go up.
Next month: We grab a polishing rag.