The Perfect Writing Machine?

Phil South ponders his quest for a writing setup which is both powerful yet also portable and fun.

I recently came across this on IndieGoGo: “pomera - Full-Suite Typewriter For Focused Writing”. It’s a delightful little 90s palmtop looking mofo, very stylish and just wicked catnip to urban nitwits with too much disposable income. Squee!

I have to fess up that on times I have been exactly just that kind of urban nitwit. And I eschew it and poo-poo it for the precise reason that for the last 20 years I have had exactly zero disposable income. If I had the £300+ it costs to jump on the running board of the fast moving but uncertain future of this new platform, I would probably jump without looking first too. It’s small, it’s neat, it’s pretty… just the kind of retail displacement activity which makes you feel cool and up to the minute. But it has some drawbacks.

It’s quite small and I suspect my sausage fingers would have some difficulty typing at speed on such a thing. Osteoarthritis is going to be claiming my fingers one by one, so I need room to manoeuvre. I also slam the keys quite hard and unlike Reacher it doesn’t look like it can cheerfully take a beating, but these are all piffling concerns which have an aftertaste of sour grapes. I’m sad because I don’t have the money but I do think ultimately it’s a toy rather than a tool. I’ve been wrong about stuff like this in the past, but I’ve been right more.

I remember for example back in the mists of time when the late Jeremy Spencer belaboured me with the dubious merits of the AgendA. It was an ugly and quizzically difficult device, and one which traded on it’s powerfully small niche and high cost of entry, both financial and temporal.

I also had friends who were evangelical advocates of the Psion machines, both the ones which looked like this new lower case posturing “pomera” thing…

…and the ones which winningly looked like BOX from Star Cops.

All of this left me freezing cold at the time, but of the bunch I have to admit I did love and buy into the Atari Portfolio.

It really had something about it which captured my imagination. It was very stylishly designed and had a pocketable form factor. Plus it was very niche and cool, and always drew questions and conversations. There is a theme developing here.

I wrote my columns on mine for a long time, especially in the summer months when I could sit out in the garden of the cottage we rented in Trudoxhill near Frome. It was cheaper than a laptop and didn’t require a load of outboard geegaws to function. Plus I have a soft spot for it still due to the connection I made with the late Sir Terry Pratchett over it. He had one and loved it as a way of fleeing the tyranny of the desktop in favour of the snug bar at his local in Churchill, near Bristol. I once drove in a panic to his house so he could recover many chapters of my AMOS book that I’d written on it, which I couldn’t export and he had the kit. But I digress.

Ideally, if I’m honest, my ideal writing setup would be a typewriter, like the one below owned by Philip K Dick. I’m very nostalgic for typewriters. They require no power (or at least some don’t) and are in fact human powered. When I started out as a professional writer 40 years ago I used typewriters and word processors and I love the sound they make. Or at least I remember I liked them; in reality they are thunderously noisy, prone to jamming and typos and much harder to use than in my rosy rememberance of them.

My writing setup which I use for my novels has studiously ignored the issue. I use a ballistcally impervious LAMY Safari fountain pen I’ve had for 30 years and a nice quality A5 notebook, but as I age this is becoming a problem. Luckily for me I’ve been a writer for a long time and suffered no kind of repetitive strain injury or other problems associated with the battering my hands take in my day to day work. Now it’s payback. Whatever you use writing is hard on the fingers, tendons and bones and when your body takes RSI and osteoarthritis personally as it does over 50, your handwriting days are regrettably like your pages… numbered.

Typewriters suck for a plethora of annoying reasons, which is heartbreaking if you want to recreate the experience, the ambience. But bypassing all these trendy, all-in-one, distraction free, overdesigned, overpriced, hipster bait solutions I set out a while back to find something releatively cheap, portable and connected. Also it should be something which has multiple uses. If I’m going to shell out north of 300 quid on a writing machine I want it to do double, triple or even quadruple duty in other areas of my life. I don’t want a laptop because they are just expensive versions of the hipster bait I’m trying to avoid. I want something which is if possible both old and new, a retro experience but with modern features.

The thing I came up with a few years ago is this, and I love it:

What you are looking at is an iPad in a leather Twelve South Bookbook case propped up behind a Vissles V84 keyboard, a sort of clone of a Keychron Bluetooth keyboard I think. It’s a big enough screen that I can have a load of text on it, plus the keyboard has a lovely silky and mildly clacking action which gives you the feedback you crave. The experience is very tyepwriter-like, but it suffers none of the downsides. Plus the iPad can be used like an ancilliary computer on its own, browser, TV set, radio, synthesiser whatever.

Although a lot of my fiction still takes place on paper, I transcribe the text by reading it into my phone and then use free online tools to turn it into text. Then I edit on my pseudo typewriter simulator. In recent years this old iPad stopped using Google Docs so I had to discard it, but I replaced it with a stopgap Lenovo Tablet from the local Cash Converters which is also now on its way out.

With retirement looming and the small boost in funding that brings I may upgrade to a newer iPad. For me this is the best solution, and it also fits on a table at the local Starbucks if necessary. But my local branch is filled with a cadre of self loathing and frankly rude staff, so that almost never happens. Maybe I need to up my already high coffee game at home, but that’s another column for another time.