50,000 words is a lot. A LOT. Yet I’ve committed myself to writing 50,000 words during November as part of Digital Writing Month. I may be rather crazy, but if you don’t try, you never know.
Digital Writing Month is a project hosted by the English and Digital Humanities Project at Marylhurst University and sponsored by Hybrid Pedagogy. It’s modeled after the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project, which several of my friends have participated in over the years. The goal is simple — focus on writing for one month, generate words, and complete a novel. The Digital Writing Month is similar, except it focuses on creating digital content such as blog posts, tweets, etc. The goal is to write 50,000 words of digital content in November, and by committing to the project one gets plugged in to a network of other folks trying the same crazy thing.
I signed up to do it as a matter of motivation and focus. One of the goals of the new job is to revitalize the CETL blog. One of the rules for having a quality blog is to generate quality content consistently. Well, now I have an extra bit of motivation to generate some good content for the CETL blog in November, along with plenty of good stuff for the blog for the comics class, as well as this blog right here. Still, 50,000 words is A LOT (I may have mentioned that), so I am brainstorming other ways to get good stuff out there without sending a metric ton of tweets like “Just sat down at the keyboard to write 50,000 words and its’s really, really, really hard” or a million Facebook posts. In a way, DigiWriMo pushes us to think about what digital content is and what value it may have. But I think I’ll save those meditations for when I can count them toward my 50,000 word total 
Wish me luck!
