The Friends & Members of 750 Words

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Last night I passed the 1,500,000 word mark, which is totally astounding to me. I never dreamt when I started on this site 1068 days ago that I’d be here now, logging in faithfully every day and having a joyous time filling pages with my musings. It’s the most fulfilling habit I’ve ever had. Thanks again Buster and Kellianne. And a happy new year of writing to all of us.

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Some days I write mostly gibberish, but some days there are sections I write that I think I may want to come back to. Entries are already searchable, which is great, but the problem is that you have to remember that your little “gem” of writing is there to be searched for.

It would be cool if the user could do something like “star”-ing a day and then adding a note for why it is starred. Then you could occasionally open your list of starred entries to review them and to see if you still like them. (Of course you could try this review process on your full entries, but that is a much larger task that users are much less likely to undertake).

Thanks for the wonderful site!

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Given that free CA’s are out there nowadays (http://letsencrypt.org), having a site so personal and important be insecure is a little bit strange.

Please take this as a suggestion to make 750words.com a HTTPS-accessible website.

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I have found this very fun and interesting. I would love to see something like a monthly trend or word cloud, since I don’t think I’m going to go back and read old entries. More just a prompt of this is what I’ve been circling around. And many thanks for a great and fulfilling experience thus far!

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I’ve got a habit – a writing habit and it’s all thanks to
750words.com. Thanks to Buster and Kellianne for running such an inspiring site. This is now an enjoyable way of life for me and I look forward to my writing every day.

Today I have received a badge! I am now part of ‘The Flock’ for reaching the 100,000 word milestone. I am so pleased to have reached this figure.

For the past couple of weeks I have written only about a story idea I have been working on – I now have over 11,000 words written.

None of the above would have been achieved without 750words.

Thanks again to Buster and Kellianne.

Happy Christmas to all my fellow daily writers!

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Hi everyone, I just want to say, Wow! What a brilliant idea this site is. Just kicking myself I didn’t discover it sooner so I could have scored a lifetime membership lol. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember and journalling has often been a big part of this. I have realised over the last 10 years or so, with the increase of computer usage, that my journalling has dropped off dramatically. This site has inspired me to kickstart my morning pages again and with the added bonus of being able to earn rewards for streaks and other achievements, I’ve found my motivation to do it everyday has been very high.
Like most of you already know, one of the biggest benefits to taking this habit up again has been the way it has impacted my other writings. Over the last 2 weeks I have started to write again on a daily basis, putting more words to paper than I have done for many years. My blog is getting hits again and my poetry and novels are developing nicely.
Thanks again to Buster and Kellianne, great work :-)

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I really enjoy how this site gives me a place to clear my mind and organize my thoughts. As a professor part of my job requires I write and this site has helped me stick to my “write daily” habit (which has always been a goal but only recently a reality). I’ve always kept a journal in some form or another, but I like how this site keeps track of the number of words and what days I’ve written. Thanks so much for making this available!

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May this website be a beloved space where all thoughts, all perceptions, and all beliefs be welcomed as the miracle that they are. Thank you for helping me, 750 words. Many blessings.

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This should be a secure site especially because it receives money!

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I doubted myself. I felt inept, unable to craft a story, despite wanting to be a writer for as long as I could remember. Or at least after the ‘join the circus’ phase I went through. I just thought someday I would begin to write. But someday never came. There were always more pressing matters. Like the ironing. However, I took on the challenge issued by 750 Words. I just wrote, randomly, but consistently. And then I wrote and published my first book. A small one, mind you. One that had been sitting on a shelf for years. But I dusted it off, spruced it up and sent it out. I stopped procrastinating and I began to write. And now when I reread what I so randomly and casually wrote on 750 words, I realize I can craft a story. I can write. And I have a book with copies sold. My lifelong dream is not wrong. I am indeed a writer. Thank you 750 Words. You do good work.

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750 Words has helped me avoid procrastination and that in itself is a great blessing. But there is more: using 750 words every morning helps me capture bits of writing that can be used elsewhere, including character descriptions that lead to excellent scenes with compelling conflict in my screenplays. Random paragraphs written on the spur of the moment are captured here and later harvested to develop a chapter in the book I’m working on. Thoughts become words, words become paragraphs and suddenly I’m 40,000 words into a book that otherwise would have remained in my “someday” file. Now, when an editor or a producer asks “do you have something else to show me?” I have a rich body of work, culled from the seeds I plant each morning, on 750 Words.

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750words.com is the best site I’ve come across in regards to creating a journal thru computer. I like the metadata feature that makes it a lot more fun to find out what the main focus was today, and the pie charts are fun also to tell how things came thru and then compare it to yesterday in that regard. In general, I can say I’ve had a lot of good times already using this site and plan to continue bringing in the good times along here.

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In response to JaTara on Sun, Dec 13, I would like to see lots of counters on a strip at the bottom. Of course, I will be able to turn on one or all at will. [words to go, words left, wpm, wph, words this week/month/year, local time with seconds, UTC without seconds, # of verbs this month, # of nouns this month, # of custom1-3 words this month, # of misspellings]
Note: Responding to the comment forced me to jump through Disqus hoops with an email address not associated with this account. I made two missteps before realizing.

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I’d like to see to see an option to either hide the word count on the screen or at least display the number of words left before you reach 750. Few things encourage writer’s block more than typing for what seems like hours, running of things to say, and then looking at the counter in the bottom of the screen and realizing that you’ve only typed 100 words out of your daily 750.

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Today I tie my longest streak writing these words. Tomorrow I start to set a new record. That’s pretty cool. This discipline has worked it’s way out into other areas of my life. I’m not sure that I’m using the idea correctly. Often, I know I’m not, like when I write sections of my stories or a letter to a friend as my 750. That’s sort of cheating, I guess, but it doesn’t feel like it. Writing is the thing. Writing something every day.
One way in which doing these words has made a big difference to me is that I know I can write something on demand, repeatedly. When I first heard of NaNoWriMo three years ago, producing 50k words in a month seemed impossible. Then, I saw the daily word count, 1666. That seemed quite doable, even though it seems impossible to a lot of people.
But, see, when I looked at that number, I realized that I could already produce 750 words in a day without batting an eye. 1666 was just doing my morning words twice plus some small change. Because of my morning words, what seemed to be a real challenge looked quite minor. Most days, it took me less than 30 minutes to do my words, so hitting the mark could be done in an hour. Looking at my stats every day gave me accurate measurements for what I could do and that wasn’t in terms of aspiration, it was in terms of things I had already accomplished.
Cranking out 750 words became a standard block. There have been days during NaNo that I didn’t hit my word count, either because life intruded and I didn’t write at all, or when I lost the thread of the story I was writing. There are always blank days and a struggle to catch up, but I never panic because I knew what I was capable of . This year, I fell so far behind that I had to produce 3000 words per day. Once I was caught up, I had a couple of 4000 word days, just to see if I could.
Here’s the thing, though, I always think of these goals in terms of morning words. Want to get to 3000 words? Four sets of morning words. Each one takes 30 minutes, so a mere two hours of actual writing.
My rhythm for writing now is 30 minutes writing, ten minute break, and I can be sure that this cycle will produce at least 750 words each time it is repeated.
Something else that has also surprised me is the sheer volume of what I’ve written since I started morning words. I got my 250k badge a couple of weeks ago. I’m up around 270k now. That seems like a lot of writing. But that is only the writing I’ve done as morning words. On top of that, there are blog posts, journal entries, stories. I don’t know what I’ve actually produced in total.
Wesley dean Smith tracks everything he writes and publishes the statistics each month. I think I’ll start doing that as well. I won’t be doing that for ego. I’m sure he doesn’t either. I’ll be doing it just to see what I’m really doing. I’m writing a lot more than I give myself credit for. Hell, even when I get a blank on NaNo, I have for sure written something else, and sometimes that something else is bigger than the missing NaNo output.
If nothing else, I should start giving myself credit for being a writing machine. Certainly, I would like the quality to be better. I know I’m improving, especially on my longer projects. On shorter pieces, like blog posts or writing exercises, the first draft is often good enough to publish. And a lot of the time, it’s best to publish something that’s pretty good and get on to the next project, rather than polishing and polishing in search of some unattainable perfection. I think that’s what Smith was talking about when he said to never rewrite. At some point you just have to ship and get on with your life.

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I joined 750 Words in 2013 and not only has this site become a daily part of my life, it has changed my life.
I started to write my first novel around the same time I joined this site, and this is where I’ve worked everything out. My own angst and all that character angst.
It took me one year to finish that first draft, a very crappy draft. But I kept coming back here to write and revise. I also used this site to draft a query letter and write about my fears.
Then I started to receive rejection letters from agents. A LOT of them! I cried a lot on this site.
Just before Thanksgiving, there was an email from an agent who wanted to talk to me about my novel. In the end, I had three offers, and thanks to 750 Words, I’ve just signed the contract.

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Private, unfiltered, spontaneous daily writing. More days than not it is about nothing like the perpetual Jerry Seinfeld show. There were times when I was diligently working on a writing and I would need these – what I call – writing temper tantrums. I couldn’t stay focused on what I wanted to write – so I finally would give in to my two year old writer, grab a crayon and clean piece of paper and allow myself to go at it!! It is like giving yourself a 750 word melt down! Now get back to work :)

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I am about to hit ten thousand words. A lot of them are articles, pronouns, prepositions, misspelled, first grade verbs, and curse words, but there are going to be ten thousand in all. I should get a badge, or something.

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The discipline of daily writing for years has changed how I approach each day. Everyone has a bunch of stuff they have to do every day, but none of the expected upkeep for functioning as a member of society includes any mental housekeeping. 750words has provided just that. Some days are better than others. Some days I write for the sake of writing. But some days I discover things as I write. Some days I remember important things I’ve forgotten. And as a result, over the years, I’ve grown in a way that I can see if I look back over all those reams of words.

I realized how much this means to me when I broke an 800+ day streak due to an unforeseen disruption, but had it restored (a thousand thank-yous). I know the discipline and the growth is the real benefit to all this, but it’s heartening to have the streak as a solid, quantitative measure.

Thank you for all of it.

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Among many other things, this website acts as a discipline for me. I once got a streak of over 200 days straight, the found myself on New Year’s Eve of 2013 in the ER with a heart attack. My biggest regret over the following days was that I did not have my laptop, and my streak was broken. Writing every day come rain or shine is a good practice and keeps my mind in the game, and that is quite aside from the id dump that happens each time I write. Thank goodness for 750 Words.

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I am the mother of 2 lovely young men. I say young men, because they are now 18, and 20. I cannot call them ‘boys’ anymore. I am also a twice over stroke victim at the age of 51 (a young 51 – but 51 nevertheless) I had my first stroke experience at 26. I was paralysed and blind at the time, but no longer so now, thankfully. I guess I beat the odds. and lived to publish a book about the experience.

750 words has been quite therapeutic for me. I didn’t realise how rambling on in the morning on paper could clear my mind for the rest of the day. It’s great! I have found that I’m also more motivated to start the day early too. And as a result, I’m getting more done each day. I am medically retired, so the days are long, and they roll into one another. 750 words has become one of the highlights of my day.

THANK YOU 750 WORDS!!!!!

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Since finding this site I have managed to write 62 days in a row, have completed Nanowrimo (and won for the first time in years) and have increased my writing output massively – all for less than the cost of a magazine a month! Thank you!

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possible longhand capability for those of us with a stylus app or a tablet pc?

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I’ve been trying to become a professional writer for years now, but could never establish the discipline of actually writing every day. Thanks to 750 words and your silly little badges, I’ve been writing every day for well over a month and don’t think I’ll be stopping any time soon! :)

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Although I spend at least 3 hours per day writing, for the last month I’ve also been journaling 750 words each morning on this site. Writing 750 words has gone from an exercise I had to remind myself to do (“wake up and do the thing, take the dog out and do the thing”), to something that is now a fundamental part of my morning routine – I feel so strange if I haven’t done it. It has absolutely helped with my other writing. By placing my ephemeral daily garbage here, I am much better able to focus on larger projects with a clear and focused mind. It’s also helped my mental health too, probably. I’ve always been a crappy journaler, and somehow this site has gamified journaling for me in a way that I not only do it willingly, I LOOK FORWARD to doing it. Thank you thank you!