Say Hello to My Little Friend: the Wonders of the AlphaSmart 3000

There isn’t any special equipment required to be a writer. There’s no super secret pencil and paper combination that makes the best stories, no ultra exclusive word processor of the gods that you must use in order to craft a gripping tale.

But let’s be real here, you’re not going to be chiseling your work into stone tablets anytime soon, and neither am I. Few of us write our stories with pen and paper anymore, and the image of the writer hunched over his typewriter, keys clacking is largely an anachronism. We use computers for the most part, because they’re both versatile and powerful.

I’ve been writing on my laptop from the very beginning, mostly because it was portable and it served my needs well enough. But over the last couple of months I’ve had my eye on something a little different.

See, I like to take my laptop to work with me, so that I can write on my lunch breaks, but it can be a pain to lug it in from my car and then back out again when I’m done always slightly terrified that someone might crowbar open my trunk and steal it. I swear to you, every time I get home and open the trunk (that’s a boot for those of you who don’t live in Awesomeville aka America) there’s a tiny moment of terror when I’m sure it will have been stolen. Also, the battery life on that thing sucks. I get MAYBE half an hour out of it before it beeps at me once and promptly shuts off without giving me so much as the chance to save my work.

So yeah. Not the most ideal piece of equipment in the world. Well today I’m here to announce that my troubles are over, and to introduce you to my little friend:

Okay, okay, stop laughing. Yes, I know it’s like a ten-year-old piece of technology. My wife  told me she used to use one when she was in grade-school.

But you know what? This baby is AWESOME. Shall we go down the list?

How about a 72 hour battery life? Check.

Ultimate portability? Yeppers.

And the best part? The twenty-five dollar price tag.

I’m telling you guys, this is my new writing machine right here. I’ve been wanting one of these babies for years. Ever since I saw an article in Popular Science about how they were being used in the jungles of Africa by scientists who were away from civilization and without power for long periods of time.

But the best part about the AlphaSmart 3000 is this: it has no wordcount feature.

Now I know what you’re all thinking. “Albert, wordcount is essential. Wordcount is god. How will we ever be able to chart our progress without the manifold blessings of wordcount?”

Well believe me when I say that at first I saw it as a drawback too. And then I started writing on the thing.

And I’m here to tell you that knowing exactly how many words you have written isn’t nearly as important as you think it is. Because once you know, then you start to set goals, and once you start to set goals, you start to feel obligated to complete those goals, and once that happens there’s a hint of drudgery starts to sneak into your writing. Or at least that’s how it was for me.

But with the AlphaSmart 3000 I don’t have to worry about all that stuff. All I have to focus on is telling the story, and so far my daily wordcount hasn’t suffered at all. If anything it’s actually gone up a little.

Bottom line, if you write on the go, I’d highly recommend this little machine to you. If you do your shopping you can find a decent price for one on ebay, and it offers a convenient and distraction free writing experience.

Overall a super piece of equipment.

One Page Per Day

Writers are all about goals.  We have to be.  If we want to get anything longer than a couple thousand words written we have to budget our time and commit to a definite word count every day until we’re done.  That’s one reason why NaNoWriMo is such a great experience.  It’s all about setting a daily goal and meeting it for a whole month.  And at the end of the month?  Well, hopefully your hard work pays off and you get something that looks like it might be a book one day.

But NaNoWriMo isn’t the only writing resource on the internet.  I recently discovered a nifty online writing tool called OnePagePerDay.  If you can’t tell by the name, OnePagePerDay is all about writing one page per day.  That’s all.  You open up the site and have one page worth of whitespace to type in.  Of course you have the option to write more than one page if you want to, but I like to stop when I run out of space on that first page.  It’s fun for me leave a story right in the middle of an important scene and know I won’t be writing any more until tomorrow.

The layout of the site is simple and pristine so there are very few distractions to your writing.  The site also has a “glimpses” feature which allows you to anonymously share what you’ve written.  There is also an option to receive a “gentle reminder” to write your page for the day via email, which is nice if you’re a slacker like me and need a little prodding to get you going some days.  If you’re a writer I recommend you check it out.

And since it is the Christmas season, I am offering you all the gift of a link to a wonderful and uplifting blog by a beginning writer.  I hope you will all get as much enjoyment out of her writing as I have.  The Happiness Project.