Watch It In Motion
The Premise
Ten minds.
Twelve volumes.
Tiles fall. You swipe to form words, and every letter flies to the page. Transcribe a real masterwork, line by line. Build an engine of cognitions, familiars and heirlooms until the words outrun your hands.
Author I
Edgar Allan Poe
1809 – 1849 · Boston, Massachusetts
The RavenMaster of the macabre and inventor of the modern detective story. He lived on the edge of poverty, chasing perfection one verse at a time.
It made him a national sensation overnight. He was paid about nine dollars for it.
Author II
Sun Tzu
c. 544 – 496 BC · State of Qi, ancient China
The Art of WarGeneral, strategist, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period. His counsel: win first, then fight.
Thirteen chapters of strategy, still studied in war rooms and boardrooms 2,500 years later.
Author III
William Shakespeare
1564 – 1616 · Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Romeo and JulietPlaywright, poet, and part-owner of the Globe Theatre. He gave English more new words than any writer before or since.
His star-crossed lovers turned an old Italian tale into the most famous love story ever staged.
Author IV
Lewis Carroll
1832 – 1898 · Daresbury, England
Alice's Adventures in WonderlandOxford mathematician Charles Dodgson by day, conjurer of nonsense by pen name. Logic and wordplay were the same game to him.
He invented the story aloud to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell, who begged him to write it down.
Author V
Mark Twain
1835 – 1910 · Florida, Missouri
The Adventures of Tom SawyerRiverboat pilot, prospector, printer, and the sharpest wit in American letters. Samuel Clemens took his pen name from a river depth call.
The whitewashed fence, the cave, the river: nearly all of it really happened, more or less.
Author VI
Mary Shelley
1797 – 1851 · London, England
FrankensteinDaughter of radical philosophers, she eloped at sixteen and out-imagined the finest poets of her age.
A ghost-story contest on a stormy night produced science fiction itself. She was eighteen.
Author VII
Homer
c. 8th century BC · Ionia, Aegean coast
The OdysseyThe blind bard of Greek tradition, whether one poet or many. All of Western literature descends from his verses.
Sung from memory for centuries before anyone wrote a line down. You transcribe Pope's English translation.
Author VIII
Jane Austen
1775 – 1817 · Steventon, Hampshire
Pride and PrejudiceShe published anonymously, signed only "By a Lady," and observed her society so precisely it never quite recovered.
Publishers rejected the first draft unread. She spent sixteen years revising it into a masterpiece.
Author IX
Louisa May Alcott
1832 – 1888 · Germantown, Pennsylvania
Little WomenAbolitionist, Civil War nurse, and the engine of her family's income. She wrote pulp thrillers under false names before striking gold with the truth.
Her publisher wanted "a book for girls." She gave him her own sisters, barely disguised.
Author X
Alexandre Dumas
1802 – 1870 · Villers-Cotterêts, France
The Count of Monte CristoSon of a Revolutionary general, he wrote with a factory of collaborators and spent fortunes as fast as he earned them.
Paris mobbed the paper for each new installment of the great revenge story.
Coming Soon
Begin your first work.
Ten literary legends. Twelve volumes of rising mastery. One cascading word at a time.