There are NO cursor keys (or shortcuts which act as cursor keys). There is no Bold, no Italic, no underline, no Tab, no nothing. You can never work on that edited version of the document on the Freewrite ever again, however. Want to export the document and work on it off the Freewrite? No problem. The Freewrite creates its own new documents. You cannot import ANYTHING to the Freewrite. However, it soon became apparent that (for me) what the Freewrite can’t do is more significant than what it can. An absolute delight to look at, to type on, and to ostentatiously carry from room to room by its little handle. In terms of the machine itself, the Freewrite was exactly as lovely in real life as I’d imagined it would be. You can adjust things like the screen backlight, the font size on the main e-ink screen (which shows ten nice clean lines of text on Medium), and the display on the little strip secondary e-ink screen to show date, a clock, current word count, etc. You navigate between existing Drafts and creating New ones using keyboard shortcuts. You select a folder (using a three-position switch with A, B, and C on it) to create your new document in, and you start typing. The Freewrite saves everything on board anyway, so you could just leave it so that it only connects to your home WiFi when you get home, or you could add the WiFi details of wherever you’re typing at the time if you wanted to make doubly sure you didn’t lose anything. You set up the WiFi (using a three-position switch lets you select Off, On, and New) on the Freewrite so that it can upload your Drafts. You sign in with your account details on the Freewrite itself. You can also set these Drafts to be backed up to your own Dropbox, or other cloud storage site. This means that everything you type on your Freewrite will be uploaded to your account (called a Postbox account) as a Draft. You go to and you click on Log In, and you create an account using your email and a password. So, here’s how you set up a Freewrite brand new out of the box: Inside the box was a Freewrite smart typewriter (2nd generation), a USB lead (for charging and manually exporting files to a computer), and an instruction booklet. I’d imagined I might be laying my calloused fingertips on those beautifully designed keys sometime in the New Year. The hall was a mess and I tripped over some mismatched wellies at the foot of the stairs on my way to answer the door. In the afternoon of Friday the 4th of December 2020 the doorbell rang. Imagine what I could achieve if I had a Freewrite for three whole weeks… “Would three weeks be okay?” the very nice person on the email asked. Please?Īnyway, after five years or so of wondering what it would be like work on one of these beautiful, magical machines, the lovely people at Astrohaus finally took pity on me and sent me one. Occasionally, when looking at pictures of the Freewrite and reading about them got too much for me over the years, I’d take to Twitter to demand to know who had one, or had tried one, and were they any good, and could I have a go, please. While there’s an undeniable truth in that quote and that approach, I think we can all see why they made the shift from “sit down and bleed” to “distraction-free writing” in terms of marketing. I have been fascinated and a little bit obsessed by the idea of the Freewrite since back in 2015 when it was going to be called the Hemingwrite, in reference to Ernest Hemingway’s “ sit down at a typewriter and bleed” strategy of writing. I read the words at the top of my screen as I wade through the mess, drinking my fifth cup of coffee, children screaming about Fortnite from the adjacent room. Wouldn’t it be nice if things were less messy? If even one single aspect of life was less messy. There are not enough hours in the day, days in the week, or weeks in the month. Then, of course, there’s winter and lockdown and homeschooling, and the kids not being able to play out with friends, or go to stay with grandparents for the weekend. When two full-time writers, three kids, and a cat live in a three-bedroom terraced house, this is what life is like. Stacks of books, boxes, papers, bags, wires, chargers, remotes, controllers, toys, board games, clothes, coats, shoes… stuff.
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