title: CharField not saving
body: <p>I'm a relative django newbie, but I haven't been able to find that this is somewhere else. I setup django in accordance with the djangogirls tutorial and created a model that looks something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>class Grimmage(models.Model):
      gStart = models.CharField(max_length=100, default='Not set'),
      gStartLat = models.FloatField(default=0.0)
      gStartLong = models.FloatField(default=0.0)
      # [...]
      gUpdateDate = models.DateField(default=timezone.now)
      gUser = models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've done the database migration thing, and I try creating objects with Grimmage.objects.create(gUser=request.user). (I've tried other methods of creating objects with the same results.)</p>
  
  <p>This is what I have in the respective view now (Why I'm not manually setting the default values again will be clear in a moment):</p>
  
  <pre><code>grim = Grimmage.objects.create(gUser=user)
  grim.gStart = 'Not set'
  grim.gFinish = 'Not set'
  grim.save()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Ultimately, the views I'm making should check if the values have been changed from 'Not set' to move through getting values from the user. So, the object also has a method called 'whatsNext()' to return which value needs to be filled in next:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def whatsNext(self):
      ''' Returns a sting to indicate what value is needed next '''
      # Assumes the Grimmage has been checked for completeness and failed
      if self.gStart == 'Not set':
          return 'gStart'
      elif self.gFinish == 'Not set':
          return 'gFinish'
      else:
          return 'gTotalDistance'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Weirdly, it never returns the 'gStart' value because it's not equal to 'Not set.' If the view prints out the string of it, this is what I get:</p>
  
  <p>((django.db.models.fields.CharField), )</p>
  
  <p>If I manually set it again and print out the value, it works (temporarily). However, it quickly reverts to the ...CharField value.</p>
  
  <p>For a while, I thought that none of the fields were saving, but the other (non-CharField) fields all display their default settings without me screwing with them. Further, I seem to be able to save values to them such that they persist.</p>
  
  <p>Screwing around in the shell, I got this result:
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/zakEc.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/zakEc.jpg" alt="screengrab from interactive shell"></a></p>
  
  <p>I'm at my wits' end. I've created other, simple django projects before and this was supposed to be the easy part. Naturally, I assume I've made a ridiculous mistake... but what?</p>