Journal

I wrote in Sixty-Five Thousand Lines Out about copying the wiki engine into a clean folder and deleting unused code. That post stopped at the deletions. This one is about what I have been doing in that folder since: shrinking it further, and changing how the engine decides what the wiki should say.

After the week described in Nineteen Hours of Not Fixing Anything, I did something I had been putting off. I copied part of the wiki engine's code into a clean folder, then began removing unused code.

Part Two ended with me saying the evidence was the software, and the software was what I was going back to. I went back to it. This is what happened next, and what I got wrong.

On 23 September I asked for a targeted improvement of the Mac app's right-hand panel. The session did thirteen things, built them all, and ended without an account of what it had changed.

There is a small plus sign at the foot of the left rail in Write and in Plot. For three weeks it sat seven points off centre. It is plain in my screenshots from 26 September.

In Dark mode in the Mac app, you could not read what you wrote. I found that out on 26 September, when I asked for a list of improvements to the whole app and for every item to be carried out in order.

On 18 September I had a cover editor that looked finished. So I handed the whole thing to a different agent that had never seen it, and asked it to find what would ruin a printed book.

I asked for something I thought was simple. When you print a book, the spine and the back cover are one image with the front, so the app should let a writer add a picture, put text into a template, and get one file.

A writing app has one job before every other, which is not to lose what you wrote. That is the goal, and a day's work does not prove it under every failure. On 19 September I spent a day moving toward it.

Part One ended on a question I had not answered: what would make me stop?

I asked a model to take the first two entries apart. Not a friend, not a collaborator, nothing invested — told to find the holes and not be polite.

Last time I wrote about getting to seventy thousand words and losing track of my own story, and I ended on a promise: TexFaber would read the manuscript and build the story wiki itself, with as little typing as possible.

A few months ago I started writing a large, continuity-heavy story, and looking for software that could keep the world in its head. None of it could. I am building TexFaber to close that gap.