Pending release

It’s “pending release”. That’s right, Bastion–the app, platform, the whole kit and caboodle–is sitting somewhere floating around the interwebs in eternally sunny Cupertino, California. There it lies in the Apple App Store staff’s sweet embrace, cradled next to their collective bosoms before being sweetly kissed and then chucked out of the nest into the cold, cruel world.

I wish I could say that this has all been only a matter of course, and why yes, duh, it’s coming out just as planned. Things never seem to work that way. Bastion instead has been a rough ride of starting with a book and ending up with a whole way to make and read books. It was never supposed to be like this, but in some ways it was. The point was to create a new way of reading. It was meant initially to be for people to read my work, which they can do, but took an unexpected but pleasant turn into a proper product. Now people can read all sorts of things that involve lots of parallel timelines and multiple perspectives, and more importantly, its become a new way of reading that might just help teach kids history. Well, that’s what some of its first users (knock on wood) seem to think.

So dearest Apple employee: remember, when you set my baby free to spread its struggling little digital wings, that after I quite unceremoniously press that button labelled “Release This Version”, that it’s about reading and learning in the end, not just one story. While the need for people to be able to read a comedy about a 17th-century siege might be substantial, it is probably a lot more important for them to learn about the 1917 Storming of the Winter Palace, the history political activism in Britain or in general how we as humans have come to live on this earth and what we can learn from that.