Writing in the Air
Notes on & review of the Pomera D250; aside on a fire
Let’s do the aside first.
I’ve only ever lived in Los Angeles for a few months, but I’ve been in and out of the city for twenty years. I love it. Every time I visit I find a new piece of magic. There’s a section of Laurel Canyon that feels like a pocket of elfland nestled in a metropolis—I first drove through it last year, even though I’m often staying within a couple miles of that stretch of road.
Wednesday night it was in the mandatory evacuation zone.
I have family in Los Angeles, and friends, and memories. L.A. is a strong place. It will gather and rebuild. But the moment is one of fear and need.
I don’t like the L.A. Times much these days, but this list of ways to help out is long and has a lot of options.
In the longer term: this is a climate change disaster, just like the Texas blizzards. (If it’s hard for you to imagine how deep cold results from global warming, here’s how it’s been explained to me: when we’re talking about heat really we’re talking about energy. Take a loose metal spring. Pull on it gently, let one end go, see it bounce up and down: that’s a year’s weather, from cold to hot. Pull on it a lot—add more energy to the system—let one end go, and watch it bounce more, reaching higher and lower extremes. Colder, hotter. Pull hard enough, and you break the spring.) It’s easy to think that, because the problem is huge and requires collective action to address, there’s nothing individuals can do. But individual acts can and do make a difference: walk one route you normally drive, eat meat one fewer meal a week (particularly red meat). Write one letter to your representatives. These acts are meaningful in themselves, and they prove to you and yours that action is possible—so they turn into large ones. Action takes muscles; muscles build over time.
That’s what I have to say about that. Here’s the essay I planned to post today:
I'm typing this note on a KingJim Pomera d250: a little gray piece of matte plastic from Japan, made because some salarydudes over there figured out a while back that a roomful of laptops in a meeting is an A-1 100% surefire guarantee that zero useful anything will be done at said meeting. This has created a market, in that business culture, for an extremely un-Internet single purpose "write words" device, a slim-profile digital typewriter that also has a calendar function attached so you can schedule your next meeting while you're still in *this* one.
I think I'm in love.
I'm a firm believer that you should not fetishize your process. If you let your search for the 'one true writing way' get in the way of, you know, actually writing, you have left the path of wisdom. Process is a finger pointing at the moon, if Bruce Lee will forgive the theft: if you look at the finger, you miss all that heavenly glory.
But when I formed that position, opening my laptop didn't seem quite so much like sitting down to do a nice bit of focused work in the world's largest porn and outrage casino. Which is also full of reminders to update my insurance, schedule that physical, volunteer for my kid's class, respond to the five hundred people trying to get in touch with me about five hundred things that I should have answered by now (sorry if that's you), you get the idea. When I was in high school, I used to go to a college pub / restaurant sort of thing on Friday nights to write my papers, so I'm no stranger to the "external pressure" environment, I even like it: I hydroplane along. But there's a big difference between knowing that at some point I might pop my headphones off, see someone I know, and pause for a dart game, and *whatever this thing is that we’re doing now.
Don't fetishize process. But 'writing on the damn laptop' (with ergonomic external laptop and nice keyboard naturally, I'm not a monster) is also a process, can also be fetishized.
Single purpose devices: are they good actually and in all meridians? Eh. Right now the elements of my tech stack for which I maintain unalloyedly positive feelings are the Steam Deck and the Pomera. But it's not a uniform thing. I wrote Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, and Full Fathom Five on an Alphasmart Neo, basically a graphing calculator with a keyboard attached. I loved the composition speed and the dedicated-device aspect. I stopped because of the editing. The Neo had enough screen for about six lines. My characters kept repeating themselves; conversations moved in circles. Structures came unglued.
Most of the other "writing decks" or dedicated digital typewriters I've seen have the same issue. Plus, while I love the idea of e-ink, I type fast and any substantial lag on a screen would add up to 'unbearable' in minutes. If I'm working on a proper electric or manual typewriter the lag makes sense: I'm pressing keys to make tiny hammers do their thing. Pen and ink, ditto. On a device? Dubious.
But the Pomera has a monochrome LED screeen with an adjustable, manageable backlight, which fits about twenty lines at this font size. That seems to be enough to avoid the repetition thing; who knows about the structure. What I do like is that when I open it up I can just... write. For fun! (And, oh neat, the font can get smaller. Maybe TOO small for my eyes. Let's see.) I can pop the thing open at ten thirty when I finally have fifteen minutes to myself and just... poke around. Aimlessly. Uselessly. Which is the joy and the point.
I started writing this essay on a Southwest flight to Nashville: There's no fear of the blank page here, this is just fucking around at a couple thousand feet in the air, with a device that will never touch the internet. The ideal scenario. No one has to see any of this unless they read it over my shoulder and that's probably for the best because I don't think our world needs any more writing that sounds like it's been written with someone looking over your shoulder.
I don't say that because I have some grand philosophical justification or theory of everything about how we all connect in an ineffable design, I say that out of a hope and a desire and a belief that the good words are out there locked inside someone's fingers, might be mine, might be yours, that we're all just trying to write out the million million names of God and the way to do that isn't to write what everyone else is writing, or to look at what everyone else is looking at. It's to get *moving*.
This is a practice. That's why it takes so long to get good at it, and that's why using LLM aids will help you as much as riding the bus will help you run a marathon. When you start you're doing pretty much what other people do--or, you're trying to do what some specific person who inspired you did, and failing, and eventually you learn how to fail in an interesting way, or, let's not be so downbeat: you look at something you used to call a failure and see, instead, a door. You start asking yourself how weird it can get. You live with it. You play with it. You fuck around, try things, mess up, try again. That's hard to do in the porn and outrage casino.
Back to the Pomera. I know I'm not going to write everything on this baby going forward. I might never actually use it for big time work: the keyboard is a bit cramped, it's not even slightly ergonomic. But who knows. You need your own place to do serious work. Your own corner, your last inch. It has to be inside your head first. If it's not in there, you'll never find it out here. But it's worth looking for tools to help you defend that inch.
Upcoming Events
Jan 16: I’ll be at the bright & shiny new Porter Square Books location in Cambridge, MA with Chris Campbell, Nick dePasquale, Elizabeth Bear, Allison Pottern, Brigitte Winter, and Scott Lynch to celebrate the launch of New Year, New You, an anthology of stories by Viable Paradise class of ’23 and friends. Drop by and say hi!
Take it easy, friends.