Le Grimoire was online. I should have been thrilled. Then I looked at my dashboard: zero views, zero trials. I’d solved the wrong problem — the real challenge wasn’t building good software, but getting someone to know it exists. The last episode of the saga.
“Just two little days,” I told myself. I took two weeks off — and spent them from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., in the middle of a heatwave, hunting bugs that all woke up at once. Chronicle of a Microsoft Store launch, between scalding coffee, an OVH server, and validation battles.
I had a one-of-a-kind tool, clear values — accessible writing, respect for the user, excluding no one — and all that was left was to launch. So I spent three months renaming menus. The story of a fear of judgment, and of what finally kicked me into gear.
At first, a simple card manager. Then the AI that reads the manuscript, the 3D timeline, the character constellation… and the name, “Le Grimoire,” found one evening in front of the series Grimm. The story of a tool that became a monster — to the point of keeping me from writing.
Scrivener too complex, the others too expensive or locked in the cloud. So, a self-taught technician and definitely not a developer, I decided to code my own writing software — local, intuitive, mine — with AI as a copilot.
Making a five-year-old child, a woman under a man’s thumb, and her tormentor think — each in their own language, without ever letting them bleed into one another. The gamble of multiple voices, empathy as a tool, and the moment my character sheets started overflowing again.
It started as a simple romance. Then my refusal of the déjà-vu dragged me into 3,000 years of History, four interludes across the centuries, and a secret character impossible to keep track of — until I was drowning in my own notes.
