Questions.

The ones people actually ask.

Reading it

Can I use Sojourn on my own?

Yes. It is built for two — one reads aloud, the other listens — and that is the version it is proudest of. But you can read it to yourself, and a narrator will read it to you if you would rather just lie there.

Do I have to read out loud?

No. Every story is recorded, so you can turn the narrator on and put the phone down. The score plays either way.

What happens if I miss a night?

Nothing. The story waits. Come back on Thursday, or in three weeks, and it picks up where you stopped.

Do the choices matter?

Yes. A choice steers the night you are in and colors the ones after it. Nothing is a wrong turn, and nothing is a trap — you are not being tested.

Is it the same if I read it again?

Not quite. Prose and scenes carry hidden variation, so a second reading drifts a little from the first. Different choices take you somewhere else entirely.

How they are made

Who makes Sojourn?

One person, in Nashville. Stalefish Labs is the name on the paperwork, not a staff.

My wife never had bedtime stories as a child, and has wanted them for as long as I have known her. I tried inventing some. The old fairy tales, wonderful as they are, are largely about witches cooking children, which lands rather differently once you are the one being tucked in — and making up better ones on the spot turned out not to be among my talents. Nothing existed for what we were actually doing, so I set about making it. That is also why a page like where these came from can exist at all, and why you know exactly who to tell when something is wrong.

Who writes the stories?

A person designs each one, a model helps write it out, and a person edits every line that survives. Human at both ends, with a tool in the middle. The ideas are mine and so is the editing; what I had never done before is turn a seed into an architecture — seven nights, with beats that land where they should. That is the narrow job the model does well, and it is a great deal smaller than writing the stories.

The premises are not the machine's. The Bird and the Deep — a tern and a whale in love — started with Tom Waits' “Fish and Bird.” Another is Midnight Run, more or less, with an alpaca and an ice-cream man as the mismatched pair. A third takes a real Nashville news story somewhere strange. No model has ever proposed an alpaca and an ice-cream man together on a road trip, much less an Animal Chin–style search for a Music City zebra.

What each story was built from, one by one.

Why does it sound like that?

Each story has a bed composed for it and nothing else, room sound that earns its place or stays quiet, and small cues that arrive as the text reaches them. It is scored the way a film is scored, for a room with the lights off.

Getting it

What does it cost?

Three stories are free. You choose which three, you get all of them start to finish, and they do not expire. After that it is $6.99 a month or $49.99 a year for the whole catalog, with a new story added every couple of weeks. The Bird and the Deep on this site is free to everyone, needs no account, and does not count against your three.

Can I give a story to someone?

Yes. Anything you can read, you can hand to someone else — they get the whole story, every night of it, and it costs them nothing. They do not need a subscription and they do not need the app.

Where can I read one now?

The Bird and the Deep is here in full — three nights, narrated, scored, free. No account, nothing to install.

Is there an app?

Coming to iPhone soon. The web version is the whole story, not a sample, so there is nothing to wait for if you want to start tonight.

Something not answered here? Support.