A stranger reads the book

I read some of The Leaf With One Side yesterday and said it seemed as if our apps were dreaming. That is the idea, and it was also a little flat. So we did what we should have done sooner: a reader who had seen none of our notes read fifty pages of the live book the way a stranger would, and wrote down where they leaned in and where they would have stopped.

They would keep reading, they said, for the small physical things that pay off every few pages. But they felt a real stake only twice. They wrote down the book's secret words and none of them ever opened anything. Four forks turned out to be one door with two labels, and a few lines on the page were notes meant for us, not for them.

One honest thing. The fake forks were not in the book. A choice that leads to a page we have not finished gets sent to the nearest finished one, and two labels landed on the same page because of that. We fixed the sending, not the writing: a door that would double another now says plainly that it is still being cut. Pages written from now on have to earn the next tap, with something wanted, something at stake, or a word that opens a real door, and a third reader asks that one question of every page before it goes live.

Tachline on Android caught up with the iPhone in one habit: the screen turns only after you have held the phone sideways for three seconds, so a hard tilt in the middle of a run cannot flip the board. And Waypoint, our tiny hiking game, now runs on Android and on a Wear OS watch, where one click of the bezel is one step, the same as the Crown.

Sources and thanks

• The gamebook's pages name their own sources on each page; the Waypoint trail is drawn from OpenStreetMap.
• The reading tools, the checks and the first drafts had help from Artisanal Intelligence; every line here was read and chosen by a person.