A Penguin, A Duck, A Digital Writing Month

A stuffed baby penguin standing on the grass in front of a Keep off the Grass sign

My penguin friend, Pengu McHugh, says he will help me out during the month, but I think he is really just jealous of Digi the Duck.

Despite my ambivalence about WriMos, I will be participating in Digital Writing Month (DigiWriMo) during November. My participation, however, will not be focused on reaching 50,000 words. My sense that aiming for a high word count can be counterproductive is magnified when it comes to working with digital media. If I find myself working on a highly visual project, I do not want to stop simply because pictures do not add to my ability to reach a target. (Of course, all this applies to my own working habits and preferences; if a numerical goal helps you, go for it!)

Instead, I want to do the following (which I suspect will bring me up to 50k words anyway):

to write a daily Twitter poem (please leave small form suggestions in the comments)
to engage in at least one additional form of digital writing daily
to learn and use new digital tools (starting with grep, per Jay McKinnon’s suggestion)
to use familiar digital tools in new ways (again, please leave suggestions in the comments)
to participate in all challenges set by the organizers of DigiWriMo to the best of my ability (though I will, for example, miss the midnight launch due to time zone issues)
to collaborate with others in digital environments

Pengu has also suggested that I help him set up a higher profile social media presence. He is a clever penguin, but he can only type in Penguinese, which looks like this: hhhdglp. I told him maybe.