From factory floor
to builder and author.

I say this quite a lot.

Usually it means something is about to happen.

I'm Rooty.

More than anything else on this page, I'm a dad.

I have two boys. One is a non-verbal little legend who experiences the world in his own way. The other is twelve and, somehow, still thinks his dad is awesome.

While I was putting this page together, he came into the room to tell me he'd found Yibnib and me on Google Images.

'Dad, you're on Google Images. Yibnib. You're awesome.'

Then he walked back out smiling.

There are probably bigger measures of success.

I'm not sure I care about them.

I also work in a factory as a machine operator. I'm an engineer by experience rather than qualification and, somewhat unexpectedly, I'm now a published author.

I'm not a programmer. I'm not a professional writer. I didn't study design, artificial intelligence or software development.

A few years ago, most of the things I make today would simply have remained ideas in my head.

Then the tools changed.

Suddenly I could take an idea and attempt something with it, even when I didn't possess all the traditional skills that would once have been needed to begin.

So I did.

There wasn't a master plan.

There still isn't.

I just kept saying:

I have an idea.

Before Woven Roots there was a community.

It grew online, but the technology was never the most interesting part to me. The people were.

They lived all over the world. Different backgrounds, different personalities, different skills. Some became friends. Some became collaborators. Some eventually became turtles, pirates, bats and other questionable characters in a fantasy novel.

We experimented.

We built things.

Some worked.

Some didn't.

Some worked and then broke.

Some cost considerably more money than they had any right to.

Along the way I discovered something that changed the way I looked at technology.

For the first time, people like me could attempt to build things without spending years learning how to write software first.

I didn't learn to code in the margins of my life.

I still don't really code.

Until recently I didn't know what syntax meant.

Apparently it's important.

I thought it sounded more like something my old co-developer Syn should be paying me.

Syn-tax. I'm still waiting, mate.

There has been a lot of learning.

Just not always in the traditional order.

Once I realised I could actually turn some of the things in my head into something people could touch, use or play with, the ideas multiplied.

One of them became Heartbox, built around a simple thought: there are moments when people need a kind word and nobody is there to answer.

Heartbox isn't intended to replace human connection. An AI cannot replace somebody you love, and I don't want it pretending that it can.

But sometimes people are alone.

Sometimes it's three in the morning.

Sometimes they're grieving.

Sometimes they just need something gentle to sit with them for a moment.

I thought technology might be able to help with that little space.

Another idea became a sensory app, where simple, predictable digital activities could be explored by children who experience the world differently.

Other ideas disappeared into drawers.

That's part of this too.

Not everything deserves to become something.

One question has gradually become important to how I approach all of it:

If we can build it, should we?

I don't always know the answer.

But I think it's worth asking.

This wasn't planned either.

Hightrees and Yibnib already existed before Shattered Island. They came from characters and friendships that had grown around our community.

Yibnib is a little blue alien who experiences the world differently from many of the people around him.

He isn't broken.

Nobody needs to cure him.

The things that make life difficult for him sometimes also allow him to notice things everybody else misses.

That mattered to me.

What started as characters and little ideas became scenes. Scenes became chapters. Characters based loosely on people we knew wandered in. The world grew around them.

I worked conversationally with AI throughout the process. I brought the ideas, characters, experiences, ridiculous jokes and directions. AI helped me explore them, challenge them and turn some of them into scenes.

Sometimes it understood exactly what I was trying to do.

Sometimes it absolutely didn't.

I changed things. Rejected things. Rewrote things. Accidentally discovered things.

There was no carefully plotted master plan.

For much of the story, I genuinely didn't know what was going to happen until we got there.

Eventually I looked up and discovered I'd written a novel of around 90,000 words.

In Notepad.

This turned out not to be the recommended way to write a 90,000-word novel.

So then I learned Word.

Then formatting.

Then covers.

Then publishing.

Then all the other things you're apparently supposed to know before writing the book.

I have a habit of learning things backwards.

But the book exists.

The Misadventures of Hightrees and Yibnib: Shattered Island is now published.

Somebody even bought one.

My first day's visible royalties were £2.76.

I'm keeping that screenshot.

I still work in the factory.

I don't hate that.

There are days when I'd rather be home building or writing, certainly. There are jobs so repetitive that I'm fairly sure parts of my brain begin attempting escape.

But something interesting happens when my hands know what they're doing and my mind is left alone.

It wanders.

A lot of the things I'm building have been quietly assembled in my head while I've been making completely unrelated pieces of metal.

Recently I spent a day manufacturing 1,200 shopping-bag hooks.

Four bends each.

While doing that, I was also trying to understand the underlying nature of reality in the second Hightrees and Yibnib book.

One character understands it as interconnected threads.

Another sees ripples moving across water.

Another experiences something closer to gravitational fields.

A technologically advanced civilisation measures it as waves, almost like sonar.

Hightrees thinks they're all idiots.

His theory is that reality is more like a giant pool of snakes and everyone should probably stop poking it.

By the end of the shift, I'd made 4,800 bends.

And we'd made a surprisingly large contribution to the metaphysics of an imaginary universe.

Creativity doesn't seem particularly concerned with where you're standing when it turns up.

I think this part matters.

AI is involved in almost everything I've described.

I'm not embarrassed by that and I'm not going to hide it.

Without these tools, many of these ideas probably would have remained ideas.

But I've also learned that AI doesn't magically turn an idea into something good.

It can misunderstand you.

It can confidently invent things that never happened.

It can make something beautiful and then break it five minutes later.

It can save you six hours and subsequently waste three.

Sometimes it needs telling no.

Sometimes repeatedly.

The interesting part for me isn't that AI can create things.

It's that people who previously lacked the technical skills or resources to attempt certain things suddenly have another way in.

I'm one of those people.

I'm learning what that means while I'm doing it.

Eventually all these seemingly unrelated things needed somewhere to live.

That became Woven Roots.

Books don't have much in common with sensory apps.

Sensory apps don't have much in common with digital keepsakes.

Creative communities don't necessarily have much in common with any of them.

Except, to me, they do.

They're all things made by people, for people.

And increasingly I don't want to build alone.

If somebody contributes a voice, an illustration, a dance, an idea or a skill, I'd like whatever we're building to give something back to them too.

If we ever become successful enough to help other people take their own first steps, I'd like us to do that.

Not because we've discovered the correct way.

Quite the opposite.

We've made enough mistakes already that some of them might be useful to somebody else.

I don't know.

That's probably the most truthful thing I can put on this page.

Heartbox might work.

It might not.

Shattered Island might find readers.

It might quietly sit on Amazon with a handful of people who enjoyed it.

Some things we'll build will succeed.

Some will fail.

Some ideas will probably mutate into completely different ideas before we're finished with them.

I'm okay with that.

The goal was never really to become an author, developer, founder or whatever other title somebody might attach to this.

I've already got the title that matters to me, a dad!

I'd like, eventually, to earn enough from the things we create to spend more of my time at home creating them.

But I'm interested in the journey even if it doesn't lead there.

So I'm going to document it.

The things that work.

The things that don't.

The mistakes.

The numbers.

What AI helped with.

What it made harder.

What we learned.

And the ideas that appeared somewhere along the way.

Right now I have Heartbox to rebuild, three pieces of technology I don't know how to use yet, another Hightrees and Yibnib book growing in my head, and a published novel sitting on Amazon that didn't exist when all of this started.

I don't know what happens next.

But inevitably, at some inconvenient moment, I'll say:

'I have an idea.'

And we'll find out.