Pulp Speed Accelerated

The Freewrite Alpha, Reviewed

Well, it finally arrived. After spending a frankly irresponsible amount of money on what amounts to a mechanical keyboard taped to an LCD display, and waiting for more than a Terran Year for the thing to finally ship to my door, I am typing out these very words on a brand new Freewrite Alpha. I'm almost embarrassed to actually admit this in fact. This is a writing tool designed by and for a very unique set of people, of whom I unfortunately count myself a member, who exist at the forlorn intersection of streets labeled Poor Focus and Antiquarian Tendencies. That's us, there, complaining that the advent of the internet made writing impossible and composing odes to the death of the typewriter with fountain pens on foolscap. We are a rather silly lot, don't pity us.

What's a Freewrite, some of you happier souls might be asking? Designed as a response to the omnicapable distraction machines present in every modern home and disguised as Work Tools, Astrohaus produces the Freewrite line of products to do one thing, and one thing only: draft words into digital files. Now, you're thinking "Oh well it does that and also has a small suite of other features!" Well, no. Not really. At least, no features that are not absolutely molecularly necessary for the task of drafting words. And many features that might have been, you know, expected or helpful are conspicuously absent. Astrohaus seemed to have specced out these bad boys like arctic explorers preparing a hot air balloon for a desperate voyage: mainly by throwing almost everything out to make weight. Robust two-way syncing filesystem? Too heavy, it's gone. A screen larger than four lines of text? Are you insane? Four is plenty, why read what you've already written when the goal is writing new stuff? Can we at least have editing functionality that would surpass, say, the average electric typewriter? What for, you fool, we don't need it where we’re going!

Stripped to the bare essentials, this is a silky smooth mechanical keyboard with insane battery life, a tiny glare-proof screen, enough onboard memory to thwart even the most baroque of tome stylists, and a really bad attitude.¹ Freewrite Alpha came to put drafts onto silicon and chew bubblegum, and it threw the bubblegum out because it was unnecessary. If you're hoping for a hyper-detailed technical connoisseur's review of the mechanical key switches or something of that nature, you'll have to look elsewhere. That's not my line of expertise, and in any case I'm sure many will find any number of quibbles with the device, especially given the steep price tag. After all, the Alpha is the new low end of the Freewrite product line, and I was able to snag one for $270 after shipping by pledging early to the product's oft-delayed crowdfunding campaign. They are currently a wild $350 on the website. (Ok see right here, I instinctively wanted to go back to the previous paragraph and edit in some specific numbers on battery life and storage. At least, I think it was the last paragraph, but I can't see it anymore. I could navigate back up the document line by line or word by word with a couple hotkey combos, but that's clearly not what Alpha wants me to do. Onward! Compose!)

Anyway sorry, where were we? Oh yes. These things are pricey, ruthlessly focused little machines. We could stand around and pick holes in the design decisions all day.

But I'm too busy composing text in a nonstop flood. Not a single distraction, because now they're all literally impossible. My shameful muscle memory trying to command-tab into a browser window is clamoring like a phantom limb, but Alpha is an implacable master. Compose! And compose I do. There are myriad varieties of writers, and many of them should not purchase this device. If you love tinkering with your draft in progress, jumping from paragraph to paragraph as you tweak and polish...well, that is frankly impossible with the current file versioning system this baby sports. You can sync your draft files to Dropbox for safety, sure, but edit one of those suckers on your laptop and then expect the results to show up on your Freewrite and you're in for disappointment, and a forked new version of the file whenever the device syncs next. I've got hives just thinking about it. You can pull the files up in Postbox, Astrohaus's web-based client, and edit there. But if you do, they'll be removed from your Freewrite's memory (you heard me) to become cloud files only, needing to be manually sent back again. This is an opinionated little devil, and it wants you to use a single, demanding workflow. But some of you, like me, are already thrilling in anticipation at the possibilities. Because, yes dear reader, this machine is a Pulp Speed Accelerator. The Freewrite wants to be used to slam piles of sentences onto the page, over and over again, until a single draft is completed. No edits, no second guessing, no spellchecking, and certainly no sleep till Brooklyn. You want to edit? Do it when you're through drafting. You want to switch to another project? Sure, you can store tons of 'em on here, and it'll save your place on each one tirelessly. But the only way out is through, bucko. Only you, dear reader, can tell if this is 1. a potential salve to every creative problem you've ever had or 2. a ridiculous technological luxury for Millennials who've never heard of an IBM Selectric or impulse control. I'm not totally sure which camp I'm in just yet.

But I'll tell you one thing for sure. I just crushed this entire review in two short sessions, without barely stopping to breathe hard. It's been a while since I've been able to say that. I'm not proud of the dopamine-addled state my brain is in, and that's why we're having this conversation in the first place. But it genuinely seems like this admittedly extreme solution works for me. The sheer enjoyment of chunking along with a tactile keyboard, nothing else to do but just put words down, is genuinely freeing. Do you need this? I hope not. If you're more disciplined then me, you could replace the Freewrite with a free minimalist text editor on fullscreen, maybe a distraction lockdown app in the mix too if needed. But if you're self-indulgent enough to want something unique, a dedicated tool for writing and only writing...this might be exactly what you're looking for.

I always try to avoid the sillier spats in the writing community, and I think arguments over tools are one of the worst offenders. For heaven's sake, just put words down somehow. That's going to look different for everyone, of course. It's needless gatekeeping to insist on analog tools or expensive solutions just as it's fake humility to shun people who love that stuff. Enjoy yourself. But never forget that even when you've gone out of your way to get an intentionally feature-poor quasi-analog word processor...

Tomorrow morning, it will still be up to you to pick it up and type.

Godspeed.

1. See, I am Freewriting Correctly. This is now your Editor, (still me), instead of your Drafter (also me). And I’m here to inform you that the Alpha model apparently has a 100 hour battery life and can hold 1 million words of text. Not bad at all. It also has Kailh Choc V2 low-profile key switches, if you’re, like, into that sort of thing.