MY ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL LIFE AS AN ENGINEER IS SPENT ON, OR ADJACENT TO, A GLOWING laptop. I use the same computer to code, research, design, and document, and even to waste time. Hour upon hour, every day of the week, every week. So I push to have my creative time be analog: Coming home to do some creative writing, only to sit down at the exact same computer, feels more exhausting than restful—oh joy, more screen time. • But while I find words as easy to read on paper as on a screen, writing does not translate to the analog world so well. After years of typing on a keyboard, writing in a notebook is slow and hand-crampingly painful. With the relatively recent availability of maker-friendly electronic-paper displays of the sort used by devices like the Amazon Kindle, I fantasized about a device that would bring together the best of both worlds, combining a keyboard with the static, daylight-readable surface of an electronic-paper screen. A device that would make me feel the same about writing as I did about picking up a book, with no eyestrain, notifications, or YouTube distractions. And I could do better than the old dedicated word processors of the 1990s—I'd blast past them with 10 gigabytes of SD card storage, triple the display size, and crisper contrast and custom formatting.•However, I quickly found that there were some serious issues I'd have to resolve before banging out a prototype. The first, and most glaring, was the dismal refresh rate of the e-paper screens I was buying— upwards of 2 seconds, if you used the original firmware. If you tried to go faster with custom firmware, you'd get persistent screen burn. It turned out that this was the major reason I hadn't seen my fantasy word processor already on the market—the few similar commercial attempts had received harsh user reviews regarding the lag between pressing a key and seeing a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]