The Portable Writer

Once upon a time, writers far and wide were chained to their desks with varying degrees of success.

Sure, you could purchase a laptop with a battery life of six minutes or turned back the clock and used pen and paper, but if you're like me, that just wasn't good enough. In this day and age of faster, smaller, better, I waited in vain for someone to create a tool that could simply and easily swap files with my desktop, but would allow me to hold an entire novel--or two, or three, or four--in its memory instead of a chapter or a few pages.

In essence, I wanted a portable word processor with the capability to transfer large files to and from my desktop. I didn't want to be chained to my desk on a sunny day, grumbling because I couldn't go outside.

My first portable device was a Compaq PC Companion with an itsy bitsy keyboard and only 2mb of memory. Although I thought it was on the right track, my hands were too big to comfortably type on the keyboard, and I never could get an entire novel to transfer successfully without losing parts and pieces between the computer and the PC Companion. Luckily, I bought it on ebay, so I didn't pay full price.

After that, I pretty much gave up ever finding what I so desperately wanted. I didn't want a laptop; the batteries only lasted a short time and my desire was to write away from my desk for hours on end without interruption. And laptops came with bells and whistles I didn't necessarily want on a "work" machine. While it would be nice to be able to design cover art and my website sitting in front of the fireplace as I am now, it wasn't necessary.

I then looked at something more in my price range: portable word processors from AlphaSmart and QuickPad, two competing companies who sell their products mostly to schools. For the longest time, i used a QuickPad when I wasn't near my computer, and while it worked for a while, I soon got tired of the fact that I could only keep a mere 70 pages in its memory and not a whole novel. AlphaSmart was even worse; you could only save 12 pages per file, so long chapters would be split into two files, which would break my momentum as I worked. And I couldn't edit on the QuickPad, something I desperately needed to do. After my PC Companion fiasco, I was a little leery to consider PDAs, but I read up on the different brands, did some research, asked other authors what they used, and finally, purchased a Handspring Visor and a GoType keyboard. Almost immediately, the advantages of being portable began to appear.

Chained to my computer? Not anymore. I could bring the Visor with me anywhere. I uploaded ebooks to read as I waited in line, I took the Visor to Florida for a two-week stint without email or the internet, I carried it with me as i traveled between my former home in Columbus to my current home. I jotted down notes to myself, started new stories, and tried to keep current copies of my WIPs on the Visor just in case my now ex-husband went through with his threat to trash my computer. I carried my Visor everywhere.

But then, a curious thing happened. I noticed in myself a marked reluctance to work on the current WIP if it wasn't on my desktop computer. For months on end, I used the Visor for reading, not writing, and my wordcounts slowly dwindled as I spent most of my time surfing or chatting with friends. At that time, Ebay auctions started to take up most of my free time, as I attempted to pry myself out from under what seemed like a mountain of debt. Add a pending divorce, a move, and search for a new job to the mix and I guess I can figure out why I didn't get much done in 2002.

Slowly but surely, the desire to use the Visor again has increased as my life becomes more stable. Nowadays, when I'm watching the fire, I'm writing as well. In fact, the only reason I turned on my desktop in the past three days was to hotsync the Visor after I finished "Blood and Summer." I've written while waiting for food to cook, the dryer to go off, or while I eat breakfast or lunch. Since I can't write on the computer at work anymore, I'm looking forward to my lunch hour every day.

At the moment, I'm stretched out on the floor with pillows piled under me. The fire crackles at my back, Zoe is lying beside me, and I couldn't be more content. I've written more in the past two weeks than I've written in the past two months. And my work has only improved because of it.

The internet is a good and useful tool, and so is the computer. But in this day and age, there's no real reason to be trapped in front of a computer while you write. If you resent the fact that you can't sit outside on a lovely spring day and type to your heart's content, then you'll end up resenting your writing, and that's never a good thing.

I still can't edit on the Visor. I do have to use the desktop for certain things, like formatting my manuscripts and cut and paste. It's difficult to write on such a small screen when something is going wrong; I tend to repeat myself occasionally as well. And the largest drawback (at least with the wordprocessing program I use) is that there is no wordcount, so my daily wordcounts have basically stopped. But as a no-frills tool to help me stay portable and able to write whenever I possibly can, my Visor is invaluable.

Note: While I haven't tested AlphaSmart's Dana yet (it utilizes the Palm operating system, so is basically a wider Visor with a keyboard already attached) it looks very promising, and it's on my list of things to buy.

Another note; Reasonably prices PDAs can be found in droves on ebay, and so can the portable keyboards. If you're going to be typing on your lap a lot, or on a non-stable surface, I'd recommend the GoType keyboard. There are foldable ones as well, though, and you should certainly research them and decide which one is best for you.

And another note: I also checked out the Psion line of computer/PDA hybrids. They resemble mini laptops like my PC Companion did, but they have much more memory and nicer features. I bought my Visor before I could try out any Psions, but they look quite nice. I'm not sure about how comfortable the keyboard is, though.

Yes, another note: All in all, I paid less than $140 for my brand new Visor and used GoType keyboard. I've had two instances when the Visor inexplicably froze; in the first instance, I lost a paragraph. In the second, I lost nothing. I would give it a 9 out of 10 for reliability, but only if you remember it's an electronic device akin to a computer and should not be dropped.

And the last note: In a quick check, I have nine novels or novels-in-progress ranging in size from 30k-700k on my Visor. Also, I have two novellas, four or five articles, and a handful of short stories. Out of 8mb of memory, I'm using 3424k. The only time I've ever been close to filling it up was when I went to Florida and loaded close to two dozen WIPs and critiques for other writers on the Visor. And even then, I had 2mb left.

Unchain yourself from your desktop! Go portable. You'll thank yourself for it later.

2/4/03