In fifth grade at Tri-Valley Elementary, Brett Miller got caught drawing in class. His teacher, Mrs. Lockett, took the project from his desk and left the room. He sat there, certain he was in trouble.

She came back with transparencies. She'd gone to the office, copied his illustrated comic book onto overhead slides, and asked him to present it to the class.

"It went from thinking I'm in trouble," Miller said, "to this Tri-Valley teacher being super encouraging. Like — explore."

That comic book — an interactive story where readers made choices and followed different paths — was the first version of something Miller would spend the next twenty years finishing. Mrs. Lockett, who later became principal and passed away a few years ago, never knew the full arc of what she set in motion that day.

Miller graduated from Tri-Valley in 2005, a member of the first eighth-grade class to come through the then-new middle school building. He grew up a few miles from campus. His father, Steve Miller, was a local real estate developer who built the Mallard Point subdivision. His mother, Shirley, stayed home with the kids — and asked him every single year, for two decades, when he was going to finish the book.

At Tri-Valley, Miller tried everything: track, cross country, golf, the plays, and Scholastic Bowl. He worked for the tech department under John Pearson, which led to one of the earliest live-streaming experiments for high school basketball in the state. The technology barely worked. Fifty-five people tuned in to the first game. But aunts and uncles of players, watching from other states, saw their kids play for the first time.

"You don't know how those dots are going to connect later in life," Miller said.

After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Miller moved to Florida with fellow Tri-Valley grad Jeff Turnbull, who was at the University of Florida. They took on a commission deal selling voice-AI technology developed at Carnegie Mellon — essentially Siri before Siri existed. Turnbull cold-called AirTran Airways and landed them as the first customer.

From there, Miller moved to California — first to wine country, then to Menlo Park near Facebook's headquarters, then to San Francisco for a decade. He and Turnbull built Chick Approved, a fashion-feedback app powered by early YouTube influencer culture. They crashed their own servers due to the traffic. They sold the company. Miller went to work at Facebook.

On Facebook's campus — designed by former Disneyland designers, complete with an ice cream shop and an arcade — there was a workshop with laser cutters and woodworking tools. Miller prototyped a Lego-compatible laptop case there, put it on Kickstarter, went to bed, and woke up to a phone blowing up. The product had gone viral. Wired. Gizmodo. Nostalgia meets tech.

That became BRIK. Oprah named it one of her Favorite Things. A second Kickstarter campaign pre-sold $200,000 in peel-and-stick Lego wall plates. Then Steve Harvey's team called. Miller appeared on the premiere episode of Funderdome, Harvey's entrepreneurial game show. A button appeared mid-competition: press it and guarantee $30,000, but forfeit the chance at the grand prize. Miller didn't press it. He won the full $100,000.

He later sold BRIK, worked at Coinbase during crypto's peak, and now leads AI platform marketing at Rippling, one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the country.

Through all of it, he never quite identified with the Silicon Valley persona. "If you're building a social app that lets you hang out with your friends and find their location," he said, "you're not doing the Lord's work. It's just an app."

And through all of it, the book traveled with him. Miller has kept a Google Doc since 2009 — a tab for each year, personal and professional goals. Every January, the book appeared on the list. Every year, unfinished. It moved from tab to tab for sixteen years.

In college, his classmate Paul Nowak had illustrated over 400 pages from Miller's sketches and story maps. Miller brought a 30-page pilot version back to Tri-Valley and tested it in Ms.. Sokan's class. The kids got it instantly. He sent the full manuscript to Scholastic in pieces — no return address, no name — as its own puzzle. Someone at Scholastic collected every piece, saved them, and when the final one arrived with his contact information, they sent everything back together. With a rejection letter.

He shelved it. The iPad had just launched, and everything was turning into apps. Releasing a book felt like swimming upstream.

Then the screen-time research started piling up. Analog came back. Last year, Miller put Patrick and the Magic Spyglass on Kickstarter with a $10,000 goal. He hit it in two days. He finished with $60,000 in pre-sales. The book — part choose-your-own-adventure, part scavenger hunt, part analog video game, with over a hundred collectible items and a reusable bookmark with flip-open inventory tabs — is finally real.

"It has the engagement of a video game," he said, "without being a video game."

He brought the first twenty copies back to Tri-Valley.