I went dark on here again, sorry about that. It happens all too often.

It’s been just over a week since I attended my 2nd The Breath and the Clay conference. As before, it was gave a nice influx of creative inspiration. Sadly, I came down with some sort of sickness immediately afterward. I’m mostly recovered now, but you know how certain elements of colds like to linger on and be annoying.

I have two main action items post conference. The first comes from part of the answer that Malcolm Guite gave in regard to a question about writing process. He talked about how every day he goes for 3 walks. I want to start doing that. But, I think I might start a bit slower. Just a daily walk for a bit, then I’ll add a second, at some point, and maybe eventually add in a third. At the least, I want to eventually have a morning and an evening walk. I think I’ll start with an evening one. I’ll be starting this soon, maybe even tonight.

The second actually comes from a conversation with a few guys whose names I can’t recall who were also attending the conference. Before things got started I sat down and started talking with them, and one of the things I was asked was if I wrote any short stories. The answer to that question was “not really”. I’d done it before, but not very often and not in quite a long while. And so, I’m making short stories something I should spend some time on for the immediate future. I think that a reasonable not too challenging goal would be to write one per week. Depending on length, that could work out to around 500-750 words per day. I also want to continue working on larger projects, and I think that amount will still leave me time to do so provided I prioritize it.

I started working on the first short story yesterday. As I first sat down wanting to do it I had a bit of a headache and couldn’t concentrate, so after taking some advil I started to do some web browsing while I waited for the headache to go away. Staying focused on writing is always a big problem for me apart from the occasional moments where I really get in the zone, and since I felt a bit like I was procrastinating I wanted to spend the time maybe finding a solution to help me focus a bit more when I sit down to write.

The biggest distraction that exists for me as a writer is that I am typing on a computer, and just a couple mouseclicks away are limitless temptations to pull me away from what I’m working on. But obviously there would be big downsides to writing with pen and paper or a typewriter. With the former I probably wouldn’t be able to read it if I put it away and dug it up again months from now, and with the both of them it would be really impractical to try to share it anywhere. I started to wonder to myself if there was any kind of dedicated electronic device for writing… kind of like there’s a dedicated electronic device for reading books.

I don’t remember exactly what I typed into the search engine, but something along those lines. It returned to me some sites that introduced me to the concept of a WriterDeck. You can think of it as a device that exists in the space in between a typewriter and a computer, though it’s essentially a computer that is dedicated only to the purpose of writing. You can buy pre-built ones, often with e-ink displays, but they’re not super cheap, usually $500+. Or you can DIY. The DIY approach can be as complicated as getting something like a raspberry pi and cobbling it together with a screen and keyboard and a 3D-printed chassis to hold it all together… or as simple as finding an old laptop and installing WriterDeckOS on it. That’s the option I elected to go with.

I’ve had sitting on a shelf in a closet for years my old late 2010 model 13″ MacBook Air. It’s been unusable only because the SSD drive in it is dead. So, after trying to boot it up and verifying it still seems functional apart from being able to used the SSD, I went ahead and ordered a new SSD for it for ~$50.

What will it look like in the end? Rather than running MacOS is will be running WriterDeckOS, which is essentially just a preconfigured Debian 12 (linux, for those of you who don’t dabble in that world) environment that boots directly into a console-based word processor. By default, WriterDeckOS uses an application called Tilde, but I’ll be electing to use WordGrinder. So, essentially you turn it on and you’re on a screen where you can type text and do all your basic word processor stuff, and there is nothing else happening. You can’t click over to a web browser and load up YouTube or X or whatever. Just writing. The MacBook Air I think is a fairly ideal body for it (though there are some pretty cool commercial and DIY builds out there), and despite being ancient as computers go, it’s got more than enough power for the job.

Just to start getting a feel for what it will be like, I went ahead and installed WordGrinder on my current laptop. It’s not the same, because I have a full linux desktop environment on there, so I can click over to that web browser or whatever other app I want to go to, but if I say inside my console app it’s functionally the same in terms of how I interact with it. I wrote my 500ish words (I don’t recall the exact count, but I know I made sure I got to at least 500) and basically figured out how to do things in it. It’s simple, but that’s fine.

I used to like using Scrivener for sort of note taking and such, and I think I might actually move that to physically writing. We’ll see how that goes. It might actually offer me incentive to work on my handwriting abilities, which I’ve neglected since the late 90’s…