I have been doing a lot of moving around and sorting many things in my life lately. The major one is getting my online stuff straightened out. I have moved my entire website. I kept my domain name and built a new website with a different provider. It's a lot of work. When I was done, I went on to improve what I had. I had lost interest in it for quite a while because my site is not commercial, and the annual cost was more than I wanted to pay.  When I found a way to cut the yearly costs to very little, I could now concentrate on content without the pressure of funding it. It is a place I can share things with friends and family. I purposely didn't make it private so that if others found it, they could enjoy it too. After adding a few new entries to the site, I decided to make a blog on writing. Not for me to teach, but to share what I've learned about writing.

The first thing I learned is that anyone with a little effort can write. Second, if you have the basic skills of language, you can write fairly well. Third, the story idea is the most important ingredient. Fourth and last is getting words on paper (or other medium).

Early Electronic Writing

Writing is exactly what the word says: WRITING, using a Pen, a Pencil, and paper, or a Typewriter. What most people have used since the mid-1980s is a Word Processor. In the early days of word processors, they were not used on computers while they were online. You only went to the internet when you signed in and had a destination in mind. This made it a mostly distraction-free way to write, with the ability to make corrections on the fly.

For everyone, from office workers to students and authors, this became the normal way to write.

The first real use of computers and word processors was in the Newspaper business in the mid-1970s. This was used instead of setting type by hand. 

In these early days of electronic typing, research was still done traditionally, by hand. Talking to people, interviewing, encyclopedias, and the library. When you had your outlines and notes, you would type them out on the word processor. The internet was still too slow for all your searching, and there wasn't much information there yet.

Modern-Day Electronic Writing and the Internet

By the Mid-2000s, everything had changed. Every device you could type on to do your writing was now on the internet full-time. As we all know, phones, tablets, and computers are sending you notifications twenty-four hours a day. The distractions while you are trying to write are constant. If you write Blogs, Non-Fiction, or are a Journalist, you may need the internet for research and posting. 

If you are a Fiction Writer, you need hours of distraction-free writing time.

Distraction-free writing can be defined at different levels. Some people say that turning off the internet on your computer, laptop, or tablet makes it a distraction-free device. Other people say that doing that leaves apps, games, and other writings there to taunt you. If you are a person who can be distracted easily, then using a truly unhooked, distraction-free device might be the best option

Distraction-Free Devices

There are only a few truly distraction-free devices on the market. They range from very expensive to almost cheap. The price difference has nothing to do with their performance. It does have to do with their availability. The other part of the selection is what you can put together on your own.

I have my own choice, which I  have used extensively to write my novel A New Frontier. I also have some other examples which I will show you first....

The "Freewrite" Machines Below are About the Only Company Making Dedicated Distraction-Free Word Processors   

My distraction-free devices in order of use: 2003 to 2021

Now we move on to the last distraction-free device on my list, my daily driver. The Alphasmart Neo2 (Click the Link to Proceed)