Is there anything free that is similar to Microsoft word that i can use?

Yes, there's a much better and free alternative, called OpenOffice, which includes pretty much everything you can find in Microsoft Office with many additional features.

You can download it here:

http://www.openoffice.org/

Sweet thankyou

You forget about notepad. The most powerful text editor in the world!

lol...i was using wordpad before

If you're submitting to Papertank, using something simple like Notepad might actually be better. For the purposes of online submission, you don't need the kind of complex formatting that Microsoft Word offers. In fact, most of that formatting will not carry over to Papertank, which means that your paragraphs will not be indented or aligned the way they are in Word.

Not that you want your paragraphs indented in the first place. The online standard for paragraph separation is to double-space between them, like I'm doing in this post. Even with the paragraphs indented as they are in a book, a "wall of text" is a "wall of text" and no one wants to see that on a computer screen.

I use Microsoft Word for writing my stories, but when I copied my first Papertank submission from Word into Firefox, I had to go through the story and add an extra space in between each paragraph anyway.

Yeah i know but notepad doesn't have some of the features i want outside of writing. Plus it has spelling correction.

Yeah, notepad works for P-Tank, but Open Office Impress is better than Powerpoint in so many ways.

This is where my Mac-fanbioyishness shows when I say I use Pages which comes with the I-works package.

Works better than Word and just as well as Open Office in my experience. Though if you don't own a Mac then Open Office is your best bet.

I want to get a mac notebook for college but thats in the future.