Finding NEO

I have a new best friend. I apologise to my old writing buddies, but you’ve been usurped. I am a NEOphyte in the truest sense of the word. Allow me to explain.

I was first introduced the wonderful world of the NEO at a writing workshop with Canadian author, Trudy J Morgan-Cole (you can check out her blog at http://trudymorgancole.wordpress.com/). Whilst being inspired, encouraged and extended throughout the workshop, I was curious about a nifty little gadget Trudy had on her desk. Black, slim-line, sleek.

At the question and answer session, I couldn’t help myself, I had to ask. “What exactly is that keyboard computer looking thingo on your desk?” (My spoken eloquence was hopefully not an indication of my written expression.) Trudy picked up the item, clutched it to her breast and sighed. She literally sighed. Forcing herself back to the non-transcendental world, Trudy told us all about it. It was her NEO by Alphasmart.

Essentially, it was a stripped back computer that enabled her to do one thing and one thing only. To write. More valuable than her American Express card, she never left home without it. Trudy reeled off a list of the NEO’s highlights – light-weight, tough, portable, instant on/off, automatic save. But that wasn’t the bit that impressed me most. I was interested, but I wasn’t about to rush out and buy one…until she mentioned the power of the NEO to keep her focused on her single most-important task as a writer; that is, to write. With no internet capabilities, no web-surfing distractions, no games or instant messaging, the temptation to procrastinate, to meandre through cyberspace was gone.

Trudy talked of the common experience of being part way through a paragraph on her laptop, only to discover that she really needed to research what people ate for breakfast in 5th Century BC Persia. And so she would Google…and while she was waiting for the search engine she would check her email…and update her Flickr photo album, respond to Facebook comments and check out the most recent Target catalogue. Two hours later she hadn’t written another word. The opportunity was lost. The scenario resonated with me and so my NEO fact-finding mission began.

The NEO is originally designed for use in the classroom. It is a teaching tool for those who don’t want their students to be diverted from the primary task of writing. There are a few built-in features that are custom-designed for the classroom – a keyboarding tutor, the ability for quizzes to be downloaded and the potential for NEO’s to connect to one another. As a teacher, I was impressed. As a writer, it didn’t really matter.

What did matter was the single phrase Trudy used in the climax of her sales pitch (I think she may be a secret agent for Alphasmart and part of their grand plan to overtake the world…). The NEO overcame her inner critic. Now that was a big call. Was it really possible that a less-than-one-kilo word-processor could overcome that hideous, loud and insistent voice in my head that keeps telling me my stuff is rubbish, I need to rewrite the first paragraph – again – and I may as well give up because it’s never going to be good enough? The simple answer is yes.

So I decided to commit. There are two suppliers of NEO’s in Australia: Spectronics (www.spectronicsinoz.com), a Brisbane-based supplier of learning technologies and Battery Powered Computers (www.batterpoweredcomputers.com) out of Sydney. Being parochial, I chose the QLD based supplier (plus they were $14 cheaper) and promptly ordered my NEO for $385 including postage and GST. It arrived within three days. My techno-head husband was somewhat bewildered as to why I would want something so, well, primitive. But sometimes less is indeed more.

Typing on the NEO is easy – the standard QWERTY keyboard applies, although it is a little smaller than the average laptop and may take just a bit of getting used to. The instant on/off feature is an absolute delight. No more waiting for my laptop to boot up. Come to think of it, my laptop is arrogant really, not allowing me to even type until it finishes thinking. In contrast, the NEO is ready to go literally within three seconds. The other night I had a visit from the middle-of-the-night writing fairy who gifted me with a poem. Rather than lying in bed, tossing the words about in the ocean of my brainwaves, I decided to get up and write them down. Then maybe I could get some sleep. I switched on my NEO and my laptop at the same time. Without a word of a lie I had finished typing my poem (about 40 lines) before my computer had finished booting up. I was back off to bed while my arrogant Sony Vaio was still contemplating its navel.

The NEO is also amazingly conservative when it comes to power usage. The unit runs for approximately 700 hours on three AA batteries. No, that’s not a typo. 700 hours.

There are eight files in which to store your work. That means I can be working on multiple topics at one time. Each file has approximately a 50 page capacity. I can switch effortlessly between the eight files simply by the push of a button.

Another great feature is the automatic save. You seriously cannot lose your data. I’ve even tried on purpose. Nope. Can’t be done. I turned the NEO off a nanosecond after I’d typed a letter…but when I turned it back on, the letter was there. There is no need to press SAVE or CRTL+S – it all happens as the words appear on the screen.

Speaking of which, the screen is tiny. It can be formatted to display between 2-6 lines, depending on what font you select. I have mine set to four. It doesn’t sound like much and at first I was a little nervous. But by keeping my screen to four lines I am forced to write in the moment. I can’t easily re-read the entire paragraph or page – that will have to wait till I dump the file onto my computer. In the meantime, I continue to write until I am finished. The NEO single-handedly silences my Inner Critic. She has no choice but to submit. When there are only four lines to see at a time, she hasn’t got much to say. Put to bed like a naughty child, she is told not to come out of her room until I say so.

So how do you transfer your unedited, raw first draft to your computer? It’s really simple. The NEO has two options – a USB cable which comes with the unit or via infrared – whichever you prefer. I just have to start my word processor (in my case Microsoft Word, but it works on Macs too), wait until the blank page is ready, and then connect my NEO via the USB cable. The NEO leads me through the rest, asking me which file I would like to transfer. I press SEND and the words begin to appear as if by magic. It’s not an instant dump of text into my Word document. Instead, it happens at the rate of an exceptionally fast typist, which I actually kind of like. It allows me time to re-read what it was I wrote at the start of the document twenty minutes ago and get a feel for the text as a whole. If you prefer, you could always go and make yourself a cup of coffee in celebration of getting to the end of your first draft and come back to find the text transfer complete. If you have multiple files to transfer into one document, you just transfer them one at a time – the text will be dumped to wherever you place your cursor on the page. It really is that easy.

I’m nearly to the end of my article, which of course I am writing on my NEO. I am about to dump the text across into Word and shamelessly edit. The Inner Critic can come out of her room and correct typos, check my tense, add and delete words and shuffle paragraphs to her heart’s content. But I have finished the article without a single interruption. That in itself is a miracle! I’ve done more writing in the weeks since I got my NEO than I have in the previous twelve months. It really has changed my life. And maybe, just maybe, it will enable me to get to the end of a novel one day instead of being stuck in the endless loop of trying to write the perfect first chapter.

And just so you know, there really will be a neophyte - or should I say, neofight – shortly…a writer friend is coming to visit and one NEO between two authors is simply not enough.