✍️ About The Confession
Background to the short fiction story I shared today.
26 April 2025
I have a couple of very different projects on the go just now. I’m working on releasing an iOS app, and also working ona novel. The reason for that combination is about 50/50 between my current circumstances and my scatterbrain personality.
Personal circumstances dictate that I can’t spend a huge amount of time using a computer, outside of work hours. Luckily, I had an app almost ready to release that I’ve wanted to ship for years. So my perennial itch to work on a personal app can be scratched by doing a lot of the non-Xcode side of shipping an app: setting up a website, registering domains, writing marketing copy… All of that is really doable on a phone. But you need Xcode to write apps, and that’s where I’ve hit a bit of a brick wall recently. I have no new features to build for release, but lots of little refinements to make, little bugs to fix.
The other thing that I can do on my phone is write. I have all sorts of text editors set up to help me capture ideas: Apple Notes, Obsidian, 1Writer and Runestone are the main ones I go between just now. Having so much time to think, having lots of ideas, and being restricted to my phone, mean writing is an obvious thing to do.
So I've changed things around a little, from heavily concentrating on the app to being much more focused on writing. (That includes blog posts and short stories as well as the novel, though.)
What's important for me is to know I have options. There are times when I can't open Xcode, so working on Running Track is impossible. But there are also times when I just don't want to work on an app. That's my day job too. And I love the fact that I have other options for creative outlets when I only have my iPhone.
The downside to this is that it means I will have more projects progressing slowly forward, rather than fewer projects thundering ahead. That means I'm slower to actually finish things, which is frustrating because I want to get people using my apps. I want to get people reading my stories. I'm going to have to deal with that though.
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One interesting part of planning my novel is figuring out how much technical accuracy to go for, as opposed to how much to just make up. It’s a story that has a scientific and even political element, it’s about climate change having a catastrophic impact on the world. But it’s also about the characters in the book, it’s a work of fiction, and there are plot points that I want to happen regardless of how realistic they are.
So I’m spending a lot of time reading articles and scientific papers. And I’m also spending a lot of time “playing” a game called The Quiet Year, which is a world building game that I’m using to set up the back story to my actual novel. Planning out the world, and working out the backstory has been a long and exciting process, and I’m enjoying figuring out how my story gets set up, how the characters and settings get into the state they end up in. I’m surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed this as opposed to getting the main story down. (It may be a procrastination technique, who knows!)
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I'm currently working on a couple of projects. An iOS app called Running Track and an as-yet untitled novel.
My Projects page has an overview of the current status of all my projects, and I’ll keep that up to date as they evolve.
Neither of the current projects are finished, and I have no timelines for them. I’m working on these for my own entertainment, and I have young children to look after, so progress is slow!
My current approach is to work on things in snatched 10-20 minute chunks, which takes a lot of planning, in order to be ready to just sit down and do something without trying to first figure out what I should be doing, and figure out where I left off.
The book is years away from being finished. The app has a clear runway to the initial release now, but I have no deadline in mind for when I expect to release it.
I’m mostly sharing this to see how it affects my motivation for the two projects. I’m usually quite secretive about things I’m doing. But I find when I don’t talk about things in public, I lose motivation once I’ve done the fun part of the work, then I feel disappointed when I haven’t shipped it. So maybe talking about things will help me to focus on finishing up and shipping something. I’ve already found it’s helped me to focus rather than constantly starting something new.
I plan to write about my progress with working on these projects here, using the tags “build in public”, “runningtrack” and “the novel”.
Running Track is an app for tracking your running, and your progress towards goals that you set yourself. It’s as much a test bed for things that I want to use, but can’t yet use in work, like Combine, SwiftUI, that sort of thing.
The app has been shippable, essentially, for years, but I never quite got around to releasing it because it was never quite in a state I wanted anyone else to see. It’s still like that, frankly, but I’m more comfortable with the idea of iterating now, rather than shopping something perfect from the start.
I have a clearly defined MVP, and a clear path to release, so hopefully updates will come quickly. But I’ve also thought that at various points over the last few years(!) and I’m doing this for fun, so if something else fun comes up, I’m not pressuring myself to work on this.
The good news is I’m working on the marketing website, screenshots, that kind of thing. The code doesn’t need touching before I ship (which I keep reminding myself almost daily). Let’s see when I release!
I’m still very much in the phase of research and world-building. It’s fiction, set in the near future after an apocalyptic climate event takes place. Very 28 Days Later meets The Day After Tomorrow.
I’ve loved creative writing since I was a kid but I’ve never quite believed writing something was possible until recently. Then I figured I might as well start writing down ideas, and those turned into plots and scenes, and here I am. I have no expectations for this project, but I’m enjoying writing something which I eventually want to share with other people.
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