This was Inkhaven month: I had to publish something every day.
It was a good month. I wrote 32,000 words, made four friends, and didn’t have to change my routines. (Aside from seeing my wife, which I’m glad I get to do now.)
It would have been a really good month if I’d changed my routines — to be more awkward, publish bad writing, and make premature plans.
A very brief review
Inkhaven is good. There’s plenty of food, a walkable neighborhood, and very strict deadlines. There are fun activities and writing mentors who take you seriously. The whole thing happens in Lighthaven, a big walled compound full of people who made the same weird choice you did — paying to write and be around writers. But there’s no pressure to socialize; if you need to focus on work for a day or a week, you can.
If you’re considering the program, and you can spare a month to go live in Berkeley, the answer is probably yes.
Advice for Aaron-like people
Henry Stanley, one of the most Inkhaven-y people here, wrote some advice that I endorse. It’s predictable; either of us could have written most of it in March. And yet, I didn’t actually follow the obvious advice, for reasons that were equally predictable.
Here’s the advice that very specifically would have helped March Aaron. If you are an Aaron-like person, maybe it will also help you.
Be more awkward
A few times a day at home, I walk to the fridge and get a soda. I did the same thing at Lighthaven.
At home, I don’t see anyone on my way to the fridge. We don’t have roommates or a cat; we don’t even have a mirror, at least in the kitchen. Soda time is a quiet transition between computer and more computer.
At Inkhaven, there are always people between you and soda. They are always having fun conversations. You’ll try to avoid eye contact, because you don’t want to interrupt and no one wants to talk to you. Why would they? They’ve never met you.
But Inkhaven selects for shy people, and even if most of the shy people are somehow friends from day one, that doesn’t mean you can’t befriend them on day three, or whatever day you get your bearings. Even if they think you’re awkward, they probably self-identify as awkward. You can be awkward together.
March Aaron: Force yourself to join conversations until you know everyone’s name. Talk to five people every day. When you like someone’s post, write them a compliment. Cancel your webfiction subs and block Mangadex until May; save your reading for the people around you. (They yearn to be read!) Random fiction is a fine hobby in most months, but not when you’re renting a room in the Wordcel Hotel.
The rats in this mural — short for “rationalists” — represent the friends I could have made along the way.
Publish bad writing
I write for a living — posts read by tens of thousands of people. I try to optimize every word. This is bad advice for bloggers.
On my first day, I published one minute before the deadline, then spent the next five hours editing. I didn’t know how to publish great posts, but I wanted to avoid writing any bad sentences, even if it meant I was wrecked the next day. I continued to edit every post after I published, which often doubled my time for a 10% quality boost.
Dumb. Better to have an okay post you can revisit later and a fun conversation in the game room than a “perfect” post that isn’t finished until everyone else is asleep.
I didn’t take many risks at Inkhaven. I had a lot of ambitious ideas I could never pull off in a single day. Instead, I mostly wrote about whatever felt easiest, or whatever I was thinking about at that moment.
Dumb. Better to write an interesting post badly than a boring post well. If you’re going to spend hours thinking about something anyway, think about something important.
This dark Lighthaven corridor represents my soul on the days I published at 11:59.
Make premature plans
The theme of this blog has always been “random stuff I think about”.
I came in with 600 ideas and no plans. I wanted to feel out the vibe before choosing topics or writing drafts.
Dumb! If you spend your first week sorting through ideas, you aren’t using that time to make friends. If you start each day with a blank page, you’ll never publish early enough to spend a carefree afternoon hanging out with the other early authors.
In the end, I got ~25 posts I was happy with (and a few I’d just as soon forget). But they don’t amount to anything: my theme is still the absence of a theme, like I’m a LiveJournal author in 2009.
If I’d forced myself to follow a structure — 10 short stories, 10 reviews, 10 articles on my weird philosophy of life — I’d have written more bad posts, but I’d have a serious body of work, the kind that might make someone follow my nonexistent Substack.
This mock trial represents… well, no, it was actually a trial.
Create a Substack
People like Substack. They know how to follow authors and leave comments. If you want them to read your work, put it somewhere they will see it. The end.
