Why I made StoryVerse, the writing app I always wanted
I've written over a million words of fiction, mostly at my desk before work, or after everyone else has gone to bed. For years, I did it in other people's apps.
They're good apps. Ulysses is lovely, and Mac-only. Scrivener will do anything you ask, provided you can remember where it filed it. iA Writer is beautiful and has no interest in anything bigger than a document.
Every one of them is excellent at the same thing: text on a page. What none of them knew was that I was writing a book. That Rabi is a person who turns up in eleven scenes and then vanishes for eight chapters. That the cover is already at the printer, so the page count can't move. That last month's promo did nothing, and the one before it doubled my income, and I couldn't tell you which without opening a spreadsheet.
So I built one that knows.
StoryVerse is a Mac app, with a small iPhone companion. There's no database. Every book is a folder, every scene a Markdown file, every character a page you could open in TextEdit if the app fell off a cliff tomorrow. That was the first rule I set myself: nothing I write should ever be trapped inside my own software.
The second rule was that the app should understand fiction specifically. Curly quotes mean dialogue, so it can colour speech, read it aloud in different voices, and tell me which lines nobody's assigned to a character yet. Anything wrapped in %% is a private note that never publishes and never counts toward my word count. [[Rabi]] links a scene to a character, and the character page grows its own list of every scene he's in, without me maintaining anything.
That last part turned out to matter more than I expected. Because the app knows who's in which scene, it can now draw me a map of a character's world — everyone they share pages with, ranked by how often. It found a cat who exits my current novel at chapter seven and is never seen again. I'd have sworn she was in the whole book.
There's a proofing mode where I mark up chapters in red ink on the iPad. There's a scanner that flags the tics that make prose read as machine-written, which is useful for catching my own laziness as much as anything. It exports to Vellum and ePub, one-button sends to my Kindle, tracks what I actually earn per book, and keeps a calendar of promo dates, so I stop discovering a BookBub deal the morning it runs.
None of that is clever. It's just the stuff I was already doing badly, in six different places, with a lot of copy and paste.
I'm not selling it. It might become something one day, but I've set myself a rule: I don't get to release a writing app until I've written a whole book in it. That book is in progress.
The honest reason I built it isn't a business plan. I have a day job and three books a year to write, and every hour I spend on admin is an hour I'm not writing. StoryVerse exists to give those hours back.
Mostly, it works.
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