First Impression: 750 Words

Yesterday I found this fun website called 750 words. It's a free writing tool to help writers set and keep writing goals, and sharpen their skills by practicing them every day. It's got a function that keeps track of how many words you're typing as you type them, and saves your work every couple of seconds. After you're done you never have to look at your writing again, so lots of people use it to journal and get bad feelings out by writing them down.

I have a lot of trouble free writing. I never saw the point. To me, if you're going to write something, you should take a little time and think about what you want to say before getting it down. I like to edit as little as possible. I was the one always getting in trouble during English class because I'd glare at the clock during free writing instead of putting a pencil to the page. "I don't know what I want to write!" I'd protest to my frowning teacher. "Then write THAT!" she'd reply. My glare would grow deeper, because I knew in my heart that writing "I don't know what to write" is a HUGE WASTE OF TIME, and of my writing talent. If you're going to write, write something interesting.

Anyway.

What makes 750 Words even more fun is that when you're finished, it shows you all kinds of stats about your words: how long it took you to get them down, how many breaks you took during that time, and how many words you typed per minute. Then, it shoves eight or nine pie charts in your face, showing you the main feelings of your writing. Yesterday I wrote about a game I'm playing called Neko Atsume (Kitty Collector), and mostly whined about the money mechanics, so my stats for that day say that I was mostly "self-involved." Well, yeah, but it wasn't a bad thing. There was also a chart that informed me that I spent most of my words on the subject of money. I didn't need a colorful pie chart to tell me that, but it's pretty, and I like the font. There are a few bar charts near the bottom of the page that I'm not sure about yet, but since today I'm writing about something completely different, I'm hoping that I'll be able to puzzle them out when I look at my stats from THIS piece.

I had so much fun with the site yesterday that I told my very-busy-doing-National-Novel-Writing-Month writing partner about it so that she could check it out if she wanted to. I don't like to recommend things to people unless I know they're not going to come back to me and say "hey, this thing you told me to check out is crap; why did you tell me about it?"

So that's why I was so disappointed this morning, when I was poking around on the site and saw a teeeeeny tiny bar at the top that said something along the lines of "you're enjoying your 30 day free trial of 750 words!" And I was like... "Um, I'm WHAT?"

Usually when a site makes you pay to use it, they won't let you sign up for any kind of free trial without giving them the goods so that they can start charging you the second your month ticks over. But there was NOTHING about paying after a certain time, or paying at all, when I signed up. Just name, email address, password, make sure your password is right. No check box for a terms of service, making sure I knew what I was getting into, nothing.

I was really looking forward to using the website to get back into the habit of writing every day, since it was super easy for me to fall out of it. And based on some of the things that other users are saying, it's a really fun way to do it... and it gets addicting. "We hook you with the free Flamingo Badge, and you'll be paying us five bucks a month for the Super Squirrel Badge!"

I guess I'll stay... I mean, I do have 30 days. I really enjoyed taking days off of writing, though, and just relaxing on the weekends, back when I was posting every weekday on my blog. If I'm going to pay to write, I'd feel bad taking a day off to relax, even if I needed one.

Also, there's no italics. I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT ITALICS. (Apparently caps lock will have to do.)

I mean, how fun is that?! (Answer: SUPER FUN!!!)