Back to School… again <em>This seems to be a bit of a recurring theme at the moment, good job I like learning new things</em>

I have got into ‘the zone’ with my coding efforts over the last couple of weeks. I say coding efforts as apposed to ‘developing our writing app’ because I have sent myself back to school again…Why? you might ask (a very valid question). The short answer is that I want this to be an app that other writers can use and that can evolve to meet the needs and wishes of the community that uses it, which means it can not be a hack job. It needs to be built properly so that it doesn’t become an unstable, unruly beast to manage and develop. As I’ve never built an app of this scale from scratch before I knew I needed to do some studying.

Yarn

For ease of sharing the development of our writing app with you I have given the project a working title of ‘Yarn’ (it was getting rather boring to type out and read ‘our writing app’ all the time!).

I have chosen to build ‘Yarn’ using a React Framework. There are several reasons for this, the main ones being related to performance and capabilities, but another key factor is that React components are written in jsx (a syntax extension for JavaScript that lets you write html like markup) and my coding experience with website design means this syntax is familiar to me. But while I’ve done a fair bit of html and css coding over the years and the odd bit of javascript here and there, I knew I had some pretty major gaps in my knowledge.

Although I was able to get the basic functionality of Yarn up and running pretty quickly and begin using it, I soon got stuck when I started to work on the more advanced features I want the app to include.

So I took the decision to spend a month or so learning the fundamentals of jsx and everything I need to know to build Yarn. I found a brilliant course called React - The Complete Guide 2025 on udemy that I really recommend if you want to get into app development. It does require prior knowledge of html, css and javascript but other than that it is everything you’ll need to get started with React. I’m about a quarter of the way through the course at the moment and I’m definitely feeling more confidant in my ability to actually build the app I want now.

Writing

I’ve also made some good progress with writing my novel this week, the plot is really starting to come together nicely now and I’m a little bit in love with my main characters. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know them when I publish their story (hopefully!). 

I am most definitely a plotter, but I’ve found that one of the best ways to figure out some of my plot points is to embrace the rebel pantser in me and just free write for a couple of hours. I’ve had some of the best ideas for the story during these sessions. It’s sort of like story journalling, it helps me arrange and make sense of the jumble of disparate thoughts and research I have in my head. I then circle back around and plot it through. I guess it’s not surprising that it’s been such a challenge to find a way of being able to manage all these different pieces of my novel and ways of putting it together!

While I’ve been typing away in Yarn I realised how useful it could be for planning and developing our animation projects too. Up until now I’ve been using Notion and while its databases are absolutely brilliant for keeping tabs on huge to-do lists it really isn’t great for brain storming in or building up the project - not the way I like to do it anyway.

This realisation has given my lots of ideas for other features I want to build into Yarn, so I guess it has already begun it’s evolutionary journey. I think it has the potential to become our ‘in house’ software for all our creative projects which is quite exciting.

I’m sorry for the lack of pretty pictures in this post, in days gone by I would have been able to add a cute picture of a snuggly woofle or two from while I’ve been working… I miss being able to do that on so many levels.

Thank you for reading,