Amazon has them, so if I don’t like it it’s easy to return. It’s entirely possible I’ll pick the thing up and go “Oh, no, way too heavy, nevermind”. And, if I do like it, I can still return the Amazon one and get the colourway I want off the official site.
I did look at the Freewrite as well, but at $550 for the Traveler it’s just fucking insane. For that I could get a decent tablet, load up Scrivener and Freedom, block the internet 24-7, and have a backup device in case my Surface dies. Plus it’s butt ugly. I lived through MS-DOS the first time around, I don’t need to relive the aesthetic.
Searching for reviews of the Qwerkywriter with larger tablets (basically non-existent, at least without downloading TikTok which I refuse to do because ADHD) resulted in discovering the concept of the “writerdeck”. I appreciate the intention but, as with the Freewrite, it all just seems…performative.
App and web blockers already exist. It is in fact quite simple to turn your average tablet, phone, laptop, and even desktop into a writing-only device. If you don’t want to go that far, there are these magical tools called typewriters and pens that the ancients used prior to the home computer. I, personally, dislike them for polished writing (I like my backspace key), but each has at least one devoted user amongst well-known creatives. There’s just not a whole lot of practical reason to pay that much for what we used to call a portable word processor.
Of course, I am likely biased because I also hate the teeny tiny screens every “writerdeck” seems to have. The idea is that you’ll edit less, but IME having less of the story in front of me just means that it ends up disjointed because I can’t scan up to remember where I was going. Learning to shut up the internal critic is also a skill that I maintain anyone interested in writing even just for fun needs to learn. Only seeing a line at a time, removing backspace keys, these are like training wheels: they give you the sense that you’re learning a skill, but in reality you’re just learning to rely on something other than your own senses. Morning pages or other daily free-writing practice is much closer to a balance bike, forcing your brain and body to make the connections needed to shut up the internal critic (or stay upright on two wheels, as the case may be).
Anyway. None of this has anything to do really with the Qwertywriter, I just got off track because I am slightly bored and not quite sure what to do with myself. It is Week 4 of TAW, which technically means reading deprivation week, but which I am currently doing as Reddit deprivation week because if I were to try depriving myself of all reading right now I would probably lose my mind XD I might scale it up to include ‘no random internet browsing’ next week. We’ll see.