Alphasmart-y Pants

Another year, another NaNoWriMo over. I skipped it last year because of school but this year, I wanted to make it a challenge because I enjoy making things difficult for myself. So November 2011 found me writing:

-a short story about a cheerleader’s experiences with bullying for my Research for Writers class

-work stuff

-life stuff

-My NaNoWriMo novel about said cheerleader (but 2 years after the events of the short story. I am sneaky like a fox!)

            While doing all this was also trying to actively participate in the Bucks Country WriMos group  through Saturday Write-Ins and meetings at a Panera Bread in Bensalem. I also joined a writers’ group at my local library in October and November which was set up for the purpose of—you guessed it—National Novel Writing Month.

            So I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately. And every time I do NaNoWriMo, I notice a recurring theme among some participants: singing the praises of a weird little “portable word processor” called Alphasmart Neo. 

And now I own one too (I think I might be an advertiser’s dream come true. Alphasmart was originally a company started by some ex-Apple employees. It made and sold these cute portable writing machines, primarily to schools. Imagine a basic computer keyboard, with a small, monochrome screen slapped on at the top. Now make it an ugly shade of green, or maybe dark blue, or black or something. Let it run on 3 AA batteries (or a special rechargeable battery from the company if you’re feeing fancy). Estimate the expected battery life at 700 hours if running on the AA batteries (or 200 for the rechargeable battery). 

How do you get the text from you Neo to your computer? You can either plug it into the computer with a USB cable, open a blank text file and hit "send" on the Neo, or you can get fancy with the company's Alphasmart Manager software and crap. (Also, Alphasmart was bought out by Renaissance Learning a few years ago so they're now the parent company). 

The Neo is also recognized by the computer as an external USB keyboard so have fun with that. 

The Alphasmart products were designed primarily for the education market so they come with educational software loaded onto them-- math quizzes, typing quizzes, grammar stuff, blah blah blah. That's also why you could probably drive a truck over them and not flinch.

(Case in point: last night, my preschool nephew was banging out a "story" on my Neo and my mom finally noticed that I wasn't getting worried about it-- unlike say, if he had gotten a hold of my laptop). 

I've found that if I just want to bang out a rough draft of something-- in the "get words down as quick as possible and worry about editing later" variety-- the Alphasmart is terrific for that. I can't get bogged down in the Internet or even the random TV shows and movies on my laptop. I can't jump back into other parts of my story to "fix something real quick" and wind up fiddling with something for four hours without doing any actual writing. I just have to write. What's nice about the Neo is that it turns on instantly and can dump you right into the file you were last working on. Just you and your words. I wrote most of this blog entry in the Neo and then ported over to Blogger on my laptop for clean up (any typos are the result of having an annoying Band-Aid on my left index finger and not the Neo's text recognition skills). 

I've gotten a lot of great information from an Alphasmart group on Flicker and Renaissance Learning's customer support people are also very friendly and helpful. 

So here's to NaNoWriMo 2012!