Once upon this time
Your story that wasn’t written before you arrived. It is written while you read it, in your own language.
It takes courage to jump on the train of hope. We want to share with you that feeling of stepping into a story that wasn’t written yet. The sense of the moment, that there is more to be written.
Begin your storyChapter 1 of your unique story is free.
If you like it, the whole book is €6.95, once, and forever yours.
Read from the library
Every story someone begins joins the library. Tap a book to turn it over and read its back cover; the first chapter of each is free.
Made the way films are made. Written while you read.
We built this the way animation studios build a film: story first, with a crew where everyone has one job.
The story lead
Works out your story like a screenplay before a single sentence exists: its acts, its turn, its ending, every chapter beat by beat.
The illustrator
Sets the stage for every scene and paints your book’s cover.
The writer
Writes it one beat at a time.
The editor
Takes every page back to the story room. If it doesn’t hold up, it’s written again.
The continuity keeper
Remembers every character, place and promise, so what’s set up early pays off later.
The butterflies
Carry each page into your language, and your feelings into the story and back.
They’re all part of our story engine, and they work while you read. About 30,000 words, made for you.
How it goes
Begin
Write a line about what’s on your mind, or nothing at all. The book is planned from there, and its first chapter is written while you read.
Read the first chapter
It’s free. The scene behind the page moves with the story, and the story notices what moves you.
The book is yours
€6.95, once, for the whole book. The story carries on from where chapter 1 left off, and you can come back to it whenever you like.
The story answers
You are not outside the story. You live in it, together with the one writing it. Show how a sentence touches you, and the people in it answer.
Søren KierkegaardLife can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
How this story began
Two people lived long lives before they met. Both started over more than once. Both had moments where it felt like this was it, that this was how the story would go.
But something in them never quite agreed. A quiet sense that there was more. That the story wasn’t finished, even if they couldn’t see how it would go on.
The philosopher Ernst Bloch called that the Not-Yet: the part of life that hasn’t happened, and the hope that lives there. Hope tells you the next page is there. Courage is what turns it.
They met at the one moment that couldn’t have come any earlier. The Greeks had a word for a moment like that: kairos. Not the time on the clock, but the right time, when something becomes possible that wasn’t before. Everything before, the good years and the hard ones, had been leading there.
Kierkegaard wrote that life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. Looking back, the pieces fit and the detours turn out to have been the road. Living it, you only ever see one page at a time.
A pearl starts as a small, rough grain. Layer after layer grows around it, slowly, until that rough little thing has become something precious.
We wanted to give you that feeling: a story that wasn’t written before you arrived. Starting it takes a little hope, and a little courage.
Once upon this time.
Read beyond your own language
Every story is written in the language of the person who began it, with the sayings, food and habits of their world in it. You can read any of them in yours.
A glimpse of stories from the library
Er is eens een keuken waar het naar bonen ruikt en naar stof en naar de petroleum van een lamp die midden op de dag al brandt.
Once upon this time there was a kitchen where it smells of beans and of dust and of the paraffin of a lamp that is already burning in the middle of the day.