Remarkable

I got a reMarkable 2 for my birthday. What it’s supposed to do is help me cut down on transcription time while still letting me write longhand—its OCR is decent for my handwriting and it’ll email scribble-to-text even if you don’t sign up for their cloud program.

But since I am currently in actual transcription hell, I’ve been playing around with drawing instead. I developed a sort of unfocused fascination with pen-and-ink drawing thanks to August Lamm’s Instagram around the turn of 2021, which led to a couple months of drawing my kids’ stuffies and then a lot of wishing I was drawing more but it not actually happening. A certain amount of this was because getting set up was a production; setting out materials took up time and space, and the subject of the drawing couldn’t be relied on to stay in place…

… anyway, this doesn’t fix all of that, but it does make it an awful lot easier to just sit somewhere and start drawing. And the results are surprisingly credible. I quit this one in midstream because I’d started “inking” in the same layer as the “pencils”, but in theory you can sketch in one layer, ink in another, and then just hide the sketch, which is almost as magical as erasing pencils out from under inks. You get a bit of latitude in brush type, thickness, and color—my “pencil” is actually reMarkable’s “ballpoint pen,” because you can make it grey, which means you can actually see the ink on top, versus what they call a pencil, where you can’t, which means you can’t.

I’m sure there are many better digital tools for actual artists. But as an off-label use for a tool that I was planning to use primarily for writing, this was a nice surprise.

Currently reading: 5 WORLDS Book 4: THE AMBER ANTHEM, by Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller, and Boya Sun.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.