Five Faces in the Water

Looking Down

You have shit taste.
I mean objectively, it might be quite good. But your taste is actually the amalgamation, your experiences, the things you consume and the people around you. If you like mythology there might be a story at the edge of your brain about a man who knelt at the edge of a pool and saw himself. He never moved from that pool. He stayed there until he died. People propose the story of Narcissus is about infatuation with yourself, about being self absorbed.

I actually think the story is about isolation.

If Narcissus had ever seen another face in the water, he would have understood reflections. Saw images move that had nothing to do with him or his actions. The tragedy isn't that he fell in love with himself. It's that he had no point of comparison. He didn't know what “himself” looked like because he'd never seen anyone else.

I've been staring into the pool for six months.

The Pool

I don't have a team. I don't have a co-founder. I have a desk, a laptop, a day job, and fourish hours every night after work. I drink as much caffeine as my body can handle.

Every feature in this product is designed by me. Every screen is built by me. Every decision about what matters and what doesn't, what gets built now and what waits, all me.

These devlogs were part of the strategy. Write down what happened every month. Hold myself accountable. Create a record so that time feels like I have something to show for all this energy I am expending to do this.

Because if it's not online, clickable, testable, does it even exist?

But here's the sneaky thing about building alone. It's not that you can't get things done. You can. I've shipped something every single month. The editor works. Sparks work. The Clothesline works. The wiki works.

The problem is that you start to lose the ability to tell what's good.

Not because you suddenly have amnesia. (You know that comic sans is a choice each and every time you employ it.) In a literal, mechanical way.

When you're the only person using the thing, you can't tell the difference between “this is intuitive” and “I've memorized where everything is.” You can't tell if the Clothesline is groundbreaking or if you're just happy because your squiggles look sexy. You can't tell if the ghost system is elegant or it's actually a bit jank and you like it because it's your baby.

I look into the pool and see my face. I think it's beautiful, but I have nothing to compare it to.

The Retreat

My friend Casey organized a writers retreat in May. Published authors, working on real manuscripts. She invited me to come and write. To relax…..

I got the bright idea that maybe I could demo aampersand there with real authors.

📌

No, I will not share my weeb ass username with you

She said yes.

That discord message would start something so insane, I am not sure, even writing this (post-mortem about it) that I have recovered from it.

You see until that message, aampersand existed as an app on my computer, something I tinkered with. With that message, I sealed my fate. aampersand had to get online → accept users → store other peoples information → ensure that it wouldn't get deleted → have security → not look like shit → have onboarding → (Im getting stressed again remembering this.) → deliver on the crap I was promising → etc.

I won't bore you with the details.

Just know that I am a bad ass and I made it. (However, if you are curious, you can see some of the menty b happing in the march and april devlogs. You sadist xD)

When I got to the retreat, aampersand wasn't stable. It still had hella bugs and I spent the first four days of the retreat just coding and panicking at missing my fanfiction upload deadline. (Turns out writing on your phone on a plane with no wifi from a middle seat probably isn't where your best ideas come from.)

When I came up for air and to feed my sparkling water addiction, I observed the other writers…sometimes I even helped them. I learned how to format books in the middle of debugging UI states. I got to see how people interpreted instructions and got ideas about how I could make aampersand easier to use. I helped someone brainstorm propaganda slogans for a fictional authoritarian government while stressing about caching. I got ideas about how to make the wiki better for collecting different pieces of information.

Everyone wrote differently. Everyone planned differently. Everyone struggled with different things. And none of them struggled with the things I struggle with.

That's when it started to shift.

A Wobbly Graph

I wasn't supposed to demo until five o'clock on Tuesday. The plan was a workshop. Get the writers to make accounts, load their books in and walk them through it.

Safe. Easy. Something I could do in my sleep, provided they don't deviate outside the happy path.

Except, I had seen them battle demons all day. They didn't need a sales pitch. They needed a conversation, a friend who heard their struggles and made them laugh.

I hooked my laptop up at 4:57pm and saw a whiteboard in the corner. Still in its packaging.

Casey and I set it up at 5:01. I had no plan for it. (At this point, five devlogs in, you should know plans are suggestions)

5:07. Everyone gathered. Drinks in hand. I grabbed a marker and said something I'd believed for months but had never said out loud to people who actually write books for a living:

I drew wobbly boxes, messy connections.

And five published authors looked at the whiteboard and said: “Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.”

I had been ready to fight for this idea. I had rehearsed counterarguments. I had prepared a whole pitch about why the traditional linear model was limiting.

Nobody disagreed. It was, honestly, a little anticlimactic.

But also? It was the first time someone had looked into the pool and seen the same thing I saw. Not me showing them my reflection. Them recognizing their own.

The demo went well. Dare I say it was fun. I spent the entire time saying “Wait there is more!” Showing off new features, taking notes furiously, listening to suggestions, and queuing up future features like a short order cook.

Other Faces

I want to talk about the writers. The people who will use the tools.

I walked into this project wanting to build something for myself, wanting to see beauty inside the pool. Over time that has changed. I still desperately want all the features that I am building and want to build a time machine to speed to the future.

But the demo changed something for me.

I watched in real time, people imagining using my tool and imagining how it could work for them. They told me, how it would solve problems they had. And despite all my big brain plans… I had never thought about that. (Narcissus indeed) I had never thought about it helping people. The product was just something cool I had been working on in my free time.

For six months, I thought I was building a mirror. “Mirror, not oracle.” Show the writer their own story. Don't generate. Don't prescribe. Reflect.

And I was. But the mirror was calibrated to one face. Mine.

People looked into the mirror and asked if it could be tweaked to fit them. Could I add formatting, timers, deadlines, mood boarding? None of these are how I work. None of these even occurred to me.

Looking outside myself, hearing how other people actually work, watching them react to the product, I could suddenly see things in the reflection that I couldn't see before.
New faces.
The demo dragged me away from pool and showed me an ocean.

Five Months of Wrong

Something clicked on the plane ride home that I want to share because I think it matters for anyone building something alone. Or writing something alone. Or doing anything creative without a second pair of eyes.

Every month since January, I have written a devlog about being wrong.

The interface was wrong. The annotation model was wrong. The design foundation was wrong. Beats as the atomic unit were wrong. I have spent five months publicly documenting my own mistakes. There are worse hobbies, but not many.

This month, five people told me I was right.

Not about everything. About the thing underneath everything. Stories are graphs. The connections matter. The tool should reflect the writer. That survived every single wrong turn.

But I couldn't have known it was right from inside the room. I needed other people to see it. I needed to look into the pool and see more than just my own face staring back.

I think that's why writers need beta readers. Why musicians need audiences. Why every creative act eventually has to leave the room it was made in. Not for validation. Not for applause. For comparison. You can't know what your face looks like until you've seen another one.

Five faces in the water, such a spectacular image. But, the best part is those faces can pull me away, when I've been staring too long.