Inkhaven postmortem 😵

1. Introduction

Alright! I did it! I've published 30 posts in 30 days for INKHAVEN 2025. Or, I mean, I hereby, via this post, am doing it. Am having done it? I am have-doning it. Unless I need another day to edit my contest submission post, in which case this is my penultimate post, and I will be am have-doning it.

I'm not doing what works, I'm doing what's funny, in the margins. It was a nice warm bloodwordbath. I'm in the inaugural cohort. I'm selectively decorrelated. Decorrelated from what? Doesn't matter. Everything. Anything. The possibilities are endless. The possibilities are wordpress (dot com).

Having just spent a month pressing words (dot com), tens of thousands of em, out of my nose, what have I learned? What have I unlearned? If anything. Or everything.

2. Why I am so clever

If I have one tip for getting through Inkhaven, it would be to have a "cheese block post":

  1. Have a topic that you can write endlessly about, in arbitrarily large or small amounts at a time; and where the text can be broken up in many places naturally enough.
  2. Write a bunch about that topic when you have spare time or feel like it, growing the cheese block.
  3. When you need to publish a post, break off a big enough chunk of cheese into one post so that it's still a legit post, but so that you still have a good solid block of cheese left over to keep around.
  4. Use the resulting slack to work on posts that have less predictable publishing timelines. (Some posts take more overall effort; some want to be passed through multiple rounds of reader feedback; some just want to cook in the back of your head for a few days.)

My cheese block was "What is God?".

If I have a second tip, it's to think of the publishing deadline as the soft deadline for the next day. In other words, if it's day 3, I'm supposed to publish my post for day 3 by 1800; so I've already published for day 3 (yesterday evening), and now I'm prepping to publish just after 1800 for day 4. This way I'm never stressed about missing the deadline, I don't have to rush posts, and I have slack in case something comes up that distracts me for a few hours.

3. Why I am so verbose

Apparently, as I learned, I can write several thousand words in a day, for many days, if I have plenty to say. The easiest way is if I've had an idea knocking around in my head recently for while. Then I usually have half an essay already, and I just have to lay it out in a text file.

The harder way that still works is if I've had an idea in the back of my head for a long time. Then I'll probably have more to say overall, but it takes more work to recall everything and tie it together. Once I start writing, it's like a crystal has gotten nucleated, and it grows out fairly quickly. It's a bit worrisome because, like a growing crystal, it kinda locks in its form, and uses up the fluidity. But at least it writes itself.

Both of these ways work because I've been planting questions, or explaining something multiple times, or thinking about something on and off.

Or because I have something I just really want to blurt out, like radix.

4. Why I make such excellent memes

People don't like my memes enough. For example, look at this masterpiece:

Maybe the post itself was too controversial or sordid, and distracted from the epicness of my memes.

Admittedly this one is buried 2/3 of the way through a 4.4k word post, but just look at it. It's perfect:

5. Why I am so tired

  • I can't really write when even very mildly sick, it seems. I mean I can type, and I can regurgitate things I've already thought through. But usually when I'm writing it's creative—I thinking new thoughts. I don't seem to be able to do that even with a slight sore throat / immune system activation / whatever. That lost me a couple days.
  • After the 3 week mark, I'm very noticeably flagging; I don't feel up for composing a whole new thoughtful 2,000-word post.
  • It's slightly demotivating to not have much connection with my readers.
    • I have no idea what my readers want, or I disagree with what they want. There's little correlation, or in some cases maybe even anti-correlation, between how much others will like something I write, and any of:
      • How much I think others will like it
      • How much I care about it, how good / important / novel the thoughts are, how much more there is where that came from
      • How good I think it came out, how much I'd want to read it
      • How much time and effort I spent, how much I polish it to be readable or entertaining
      • How much feedback I received or integrated
    • On the other hand, it's not that demotivating, because mostly I'm motivated to write for reasons other than many people liking what I wrote. Mainly it's demotivating specifically about writing something mainly because I think many other people will like it.
    • And I don't think I should spend much energy at all writing stuff mainly because I think many other people will like it.
    • Occasionally someone tells me they got something out of something I wrote. That's nice! I think I actually currently get approximately the right level of this happening, which is a strange opinion given the above, but I do think it. Maybe take your top one favorite niche writer and send them a message saying you liked what they wrote?
    • In a sense this demotivation is good?

6. Endnotes

  • There's an annoying variance and unpredictability in the difficulty of projects. Some posts take four full days of work to prep, when I expected one. Normally this is fine, but not during Inkhaven, and leads to frustration, wasted motion, and shelved projects.
  • Feedback:
    • Often the most useful part of feedback is the pointer to the sentence / paragraph / section that the feedbacker is commenting on, rather than their suggested fix or even their statements about what went wrong in that spot.
    • Often when getting feedback, the feedbacker will point at a spot, and then I'll realize "oh yeah I kinda knew that was a trouble spot and just... forgot or didn't do anything or didn't raise it to conscious attention". That's some kind of opportunity for learning or something for me.

7. thanks

ok that's it thanks ben and lucie thanks eukaryote and justis thanks inklings thanks lighthaven thanks wordpress.com goodnight cow jumping over the moon byee