DigiWriMo!

Twelve days until DigiWriMo! It's going to send me into a writing and self-publishing spree like no other.

What is it? 

Digi the Duck

DigiWriMo is short for Digital Writing Month, and it's an online, month-long event happening in November 2012. It's modeled on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but instead of writing a 50,000-word novel in one month, you write and self-publish 50,000 words of digital writing in one month. That could be blog posts, online articles, Tweets, Facebook status updates, Wikis, emails--whatever, so long as it's digital. They'll also have weekly writing challenges posted on the digiwrimo.com website; weekly Friday night Twitter socials; and a free, face-to-face, write-all-night event at Marylhurst University on November 17th (registration required).

Why I'm excited about DigiWriMo

1. I like to have goals with firm deadlines
2. It'll challenge me not only to produce a significant amount of writing each day but also to publish it
3. And therefore will give me more practice at sharing things that are still in draft form
4. DigiWriMo doesn't confine me to writing about just one thing, like NaNoWriMo would; I can write lots of little things on all sorts of subjects
5. @Jessifer promised me it would help me get new Twitter followers

Toward a plan for DigiWriMo
Fifty thousand words in 30 days is approximately 1,667 words per day. I have five active blogs: this one, World Citizen, The Penny Pincher, Plain Jane, and my pseudonym's blog. I also have a HubPages account, which I have not really done much of anything with yet, but DigiWriMo is giving me a great excuse to write the crap outta some Hubs and see what happens. The average blog post/online article is supposed to be around 400-500 words, which would mean 3 posts per day and a couple hundred words left over for Tweets and Facebook status updates. The plan, therefore, is to get to 1500 words each day via two blog posts and one Hub. I will not count emails toward the 50K words, and all the writing I count will be new writing produced in the month of November.

Since we're responsible for tracking our own word count, I'll be using Scrivener to do just that. I can create a new project with one section per method of publication, and that way I can not only track total number of words but also break it down at the end of the day/week/month and see how many of those words were published on this blog vs. a Hub, for example.

Of course there's still the question of what to write/publish, not just where and how many words. But I've been making lists (oh, how I love lists!) of ideas for each venue--articles I might write for HubPages, topics appropriate to this blog or to World Citizen, books and restaurants I want to review, recipes and tips for saving money I want to share, etc. Oh boy, oh boy! So many ideas!

Wanna join me?
To register for DigiWriMo, visit www.digiwrimo.com.
Follow Digi the Duck on Twitter: @digiwrimo

(This post is 523 words, by the way, not counting this sentence.)