Big announcement: Wallachia is now completely free to read or listen to; no subscription required.

In place of a subscription paywall, there are little “pay what you like” buttons at the end of each chapter. You can support me by chipping something in after you read each chapter, or once a month, or whenever your lotto winnings come in, or not at all. For merely reading my story at all, you have my thanks.

Behind the scenes, I think this is the right choice going forward. There’s been a bit of a shift toward using the subscription model in apps, and I get why many people are unwilling to commit to an ongoing monthly fee, especially from an unknown author. I had envisioned Wallachia as something in the model of a magazine that you subscribe to in order to get new issues (or, to be precise, a penny dreadful). While I did pick up subscribers, I’m hopeful that making it free will get more people to experience my little historical, political vampire story.

1.2 is currently trickling down through the App Store. Depending on prevailing winds on the superhighway and traffic in the tubes, you should see the update soon.

Chapter seven is written but needs a bit of revision before it’s ready. Friday, probably.

Existing Subscribers

First of all, thank you for being here from the beginning!

I will be cancelling the current monthly plan soon. Once you’ve upgraded to 1.2, you can cancel it yourself using these instructions, or wait until the subscription ends on its own. Depending on when your next billing cycle starts, you might want to do it early. The reason I can’t end the subscription immediately is that 1.1 still stop working once I do and I want to give everyone time for the update to go through.

Developer Stuff

I played a little bit with SwiftUI for this version, but didn’t end up using the view I’d built in it. Originally I was going to have a “tip” page after each chapter asking for readers to optionally pay. I made a simple view in SwiftUI and it worked fine, but as I did my testing it felt too much like a nagging popup like you get on news sites. The design I settled on (little buttons at the bottom of the news page) feels less obtrusive and gentler.

Down the road, I have a much bigger update coming, but I think it’ll wind up being built in UIKit. I do a ton of stuff with UITextViews and text stuff, and SwiftUI’s Text object doesn’t let you do any formatting within the text. And even if it allowed you to set an NSAttributedString, I need the pagination stuff I get from NSLayoutManager so that I can show you a specific page of text at a time. I could embed it in hosting controller, but since the text view is like 90% of what you see, why bother?