it was more or less just keeping a journal. I write about places that I go, things going on at my job, stuff that I want to get done during the day, the weather, the ongoing process of trying to get the guys I play music with to become an actual band, my efforts to find financial aid for college… Pretty much just anything that crosses my mind first thing in the morning, when I’m usually doing my writing. The big thing for me, like I mentioned in my how-to entry, is just starting the process of writing. If you’re actually looking for any kind of ideas toward writing a novel, I’m certainly not the person to be asking. Most of my writing is quite personal and quite boring. But it lets me keep track of ideas that I’ve had, things that I ought to be doing but forget to write in other places, the names of people I meet, and so forth. It’s more or less just a brain dump every morning.

Good luck with your writing!

I used my Google account to sign up. I do like the fact that they give a number of options for signing up. I like the daily prompts and the rewards, too. You go through a lot of the reward badges right up front, but after about a month, they slow down dramatically. I think it took me about another month and a half after my first month before I got another badge.

I definitely can’t afford to be a patron right now, but they don’t really seem to hound you about it. I haven’t received any nagging at all about patronage, and I haven’t been able to donate anything at all since I’ve signed up. Whenever I do get myself a better paying job, I’ll definitely donate a bit, but for now they seem content with me just signing in and writing every day.

I haven’t had the problem with it not saving. I’ve received one nasty little nag screen like that, but I haven’t seen it for a while. That one was a note that it’s trying to save, but the number of words I currently have is less than the number of words it saved at last time. I don’t know why it kept doing that for a while, but since they’ve moved to their new servers (about two months ago), I haven’t seen it unless I actually did delete some words between saves.

Good luck with the writing, though. I think it’s a cool site, and it works for me, but everyone needs to find what works best for them…