Reverie is coming to iPad and iPhone, and it still won’t have sync. Your novel is safer for it.
I’m bringing Reverie to iPad and iPhone, and I hope to have it out before November. The same warm page and the same manuscript, chapters and scenes and all, on the device in your bag. And whenever I tell someone that, the same question comes back: how does the novel you drafted on the Mac turn up on the iPad, when Reverie has no sync? There’s no Reverie cloud and no account to sign into.
It’s already there. Your manuscript never lived inside Reverie to begin with.
Where your novel actually lives
A Reverie manuscript is a folder of ordinary files, usually one per chapter. You can see them in the Finder or in File Explorer, open them in any app you like, and back them up by copying them, the same as your photos. Reverie reads them and writes them. It doesn’t own them, any more than your camera owns your pictures.
Most writing apps work the other way round. They keep your book inside their own private filing system, and once your words live in a private format, moving them between devices becomes the app’s problem to solve. So the app builds its own sync service, and now there’s an account to manage and a copy of your novel sitting on someone else’s servers. It’s invisible while it works. When it breaks, it breaks somewhere you can’t see or reach, and every writers’ group has heard the story of the project that wouldn’t open afterwards.
Reverie skips the problem instead of solving it. Ordinary files in an ordinary folder can be carried by machinery you already own. iCloud Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive have spent years learning to move files between devices, and they are very good at it. Your novel doesn’t need special treatment, only to be the kind of thing they already know how to carry.
The setup, such as it is
Keep your manuscript folder somewhere that syncs. On a Mac that usually means iCloud Drive: a folder there is on every Mac you sign into, without you doing anything further. On Windows the same job is done by OneDrive or Dropbox. If you have any of these, and nearly everyone does, your novel now travels with the storage you already had.
That’s the whole setup. Reverie doesn’t need to know it’s happening, and your writing never passes through me. There’s no account to create and no monthly fee keeping the connection alive.
When the iPad and iPhone app arrives, this same folder is the setup for that too. You’ll open Reverie, point it at your manuscript in the Files app, and write. Finish a scene on the train and it’s on your Mac when you get home.
The honest part
Two devices and one chapter means it’s possible, once in a while, to edit the same file in two places before they’ve had a chance to talk to each other. Write on the iPad in a café with no wifi, then come home and change the same chapter on the Mac before the iPad gets back online, and the two copies will disagree.
When that happens, Reverie throws neither version away: it sets the second version down beside the original as a conflicted copy. What you find in your folder is two readable versions of the chapter, side by side, in plain text. You open both, keep what you want, and delete the other. Annoying, certainly. But compare it with what a conflict does inside a private format, where the disagreement lands in machinery you can’t open. With plain files, the worst case is reading.
In practice you’ll rarely see it. When your devices are online, a saved chapter settles across them in seconds, and the window where both copies change while separated is a narrow one. It exists, though, and I’d rather you heard it from me than met it as a surprise.
What this costs
This approach gives up some things, and you should know what they are before you trust a book to it. There’s no live collaboration: two people can’t type into the same chapter at once, and Reverie will never be the right tool for co-writing a draft in real time. There’s no clever merging when two edits collide; you get the two copies and you choose. And sync arrives at whatever speed your provider carries it, which is usually seconds and occasionally isn’t.
What you get in return is a novel that belongs to you in the plainest sense. Files you can open in twenty years, in anything, with no subscription standing between you and your own words. And nothing for me to lose or leak, because I never have your writing in the first place. When the iPad app lands, it picks up your manuscript exactly where the Mac left off, without either of them ever having heard of a Reverie account.
A novel is years of your life. It deserves to live somewhere plainer than the inside of an app. Reverie keeps it in a drawer you own, and iPad and iPhone simply get their own key. The folder you set up today is all the preparation they’ll need.
Mark
Reverie is out now for Mac and Windows, and the trial is free for 15 days. The folder you write in today is the one your iPad will open.
