Alpha

My Alpha Raven Black with Backlight purchase was primarily so I could travel without concern for a $3k laptop, but it quickly became such a valuable asset to me I worry about it just as much. : )

That said, the learning curve was much less steep than I thought, and I was up and running in no time with wifi, postbox, and cloud backups. So no problem there. Accessing menus was just as easy, I wouldn’t call it intuitive, but once you’ve done it a couple times you’ll have it down. Besides, you just want to write on the Freewrite once you’ve used it, so the less messing with menus the better, and you’ll see the reason and advantages of the setup/workflows.

Next was how would I feel about trying to write short (blogs), medium (short stories), and long (multi chapter stories) on such a tiny screen? After experimenting I settled on a comfortable process for me of- blogs get a new doc bashed out all at once and then I use the send function to pick it up in my email and put it wherever I want. Short stories get a new doc, and I feel comfortable if I have to put it down for the night because all my work shows up in postbox flawlessly, and I’m not concerned about losing anything. When the story is done days later I just copy the writing into Scrivener from postbox or email to finish up. Finally, for chapter stories I just do a new file for each chapter, same process to get it transferred over and then assemble and edit in Scrivener.

I’ve never been a basher and tended to plot or slowly plod through carefully thought out writing or pre-established outlines. With the Freewrite, I threw caution to the wind and bashed out my ideas with little to no edits (unless a misspell drove me absolutely nuts), and found that the uninterrupted flow helped me with through lines for stories and I had much more cohesive stories much quicker than when I pause/reread/repeat over and over. Since I’m not stopping to edit, I tend to hang onto the thread of my ideas and chase them down more quickly as well. In short, changing my process to accommodate the Freewrite gave me time to edit and complete a much better story than the process I used before.

All in all, great product, and yes, it comes with stickers. : )

This go-anywhere machine creates a perfect writing bubble whether you’re outside or in. Thanks!

My writer's block was less about not having ideas and more about the mental resistance to flipping through notebook pages after writing by hand, and then meticulously typing up my second draft. It was time to revolutionize my writing process. This is one of the best purchases I have ever made and most certainly the most important investment I will have ever made in my creative journey. It is wonderful to feel the itch to write again. I have written more int he past week than I have in the past two years, and it's only the beginning. Thank you, Freewrite!

I love the keyboard and backlight. My travler is great, but without backlight, it is not as versatile as the Alpha. It is pretty much the same weight as well. Job well done!

So I am consistently inconsistent when it comes to sitting down to write--I'm easily distracted, and once distracted, it's difficult to refocus. The Alpha makes it so difficult to get distracted in the first place, because there's nothing to do with it except write. I took it with me to the coffee shop while I waited for the dogs to get done at the groomer. I was there for three hours, and wrote almost 5,000 words in that time. I'm blown away! I haven't had wordcounts like that since I was in college!