The month-long Inkhaven residency has come to a close; I do not know if I am a better writer at the end of it, but I have more public evidence to prove that I am a writer.

I’m glad that it’s over because I was struggling to keep up with it remotely. I defaulted to more free-form memoirist writing as a consequence of deprived spirit and sleep—I have still not recovered from my jet lag. Doing the a distance program, where you find motivation within you, is nowhere close to doing it in person, where you can feed off of others’ much like a vampire. I really do feel for the COVID generation that when through college without the camaraderie.

That said, I have answered some questions I asked myself on my experience of Inkhaven and writing every day.

What I achieved at Inkhaven?

1. I evaded Inkhavalhallah.

   I published 29 posts totalling 31,355 words¹ during Inkhaven, excluding this post. This is twice the Goodhartian target of 15,000 words. I think this is okay.

2. I achieved my goal of writing fiction.

   I wrote three stories, two more than my intended objective. Of these, I think the last one—The Selfless Driving Car—actually has legs (no, I will not take the low-hanging joke). The process of creating this felt more natural than the other two. I began this piece with the title; the obvious idea and original intent was to write a tongue-in-cheek essay based on a silly discussion with my friends on the Selfless aspect of the Waymo we had just taken. But, in writing, it was just not hitting the funny notes and was thus also not fun to write. And then I decided that I’d just write as the car and write something dumb that explores the same concept. This felt like the most creatively satisfying piece I wrote at Inkhaven.

3. I achieved my objective of writing in a variety of voices.

   I feel pretty satisfied with the spread of writing I have done, both in terms of topics, as well as voice. I attempted some satire in The Button of Mass Distraction and Dating is not charity. I also did some “normal” (and really annoying-to-write) pieces on topics I know enough about (like Google’s Space Data Centers); and some that I have some random notes on but that lacked structure, like the serialised Huxley pieces. More on that later.

What am I grateful to Inkhaven for?

1. Inkhaven was incredibly generative for me.

   Of the 29 posts, I wrote 25 new blogposts this month, from scratch². Of the remaining four, one was written on the plane to capture having still not come to terms with how liberated I feel with my shiny new British passport. All I can say is ‘merica really knows how to break a man (or this man); the other three were loosely defined before Inkhaven. Two are here and the third (the Huxley pieces are in the next section):

   • One was on learning about the virtue of weekends from the English, which had some meat (maybe 200 words?) before I detailed it at Inkhaven.
   • The Best and Worst Advice for Academic Writing had just the title. My original intent was to write a piece on Best and Worst Advice as a class of advice useful in many areas. I thought I’d have time to ponder this at Inkhaven but I was wrong so settled on the one area I knew best. I realise that abstract concept pieces require more time and thinking, at least for me.

2. The talent and energy that was put under one roof, was pretty terrific.

   I do not think I would have churned out my blogposts or stayed accountable from London had it not been for the energy of the talent there. I am not just talking about the high quality roster of advisors and contributing writers but the residents. I mean, there are some devastatingly good writers here. I read Tomás, Vishal, and Jenn early into my residency and decided that it would be bad for my ego to read anymore. I have since read more of the participants and am patting myself on the back for this wisdom.

3. Inkhaven/Lightaven’s incredible generosity and warmth.

   Lighthaven is just really unique and delightful in terms of places to do interesting little projects like thisPlease get some real plants though, guys! It’s California! Succulents need little to no water, y’all!. The crew is also pretty great. It’s not everyday someone in their late 30s feels like they are part of some weird emergent subculture—especially not post-COVID—but this felt pretty darn close and that was very, very cool. And there’re just tons of lovely humans around. Shout out to Ben Pace for being just the best Brit in the Bay Area. Rafe, you are a close second, which is saying something as we only spoke for a short while on one of my last days there.

What new things did I try at Inkhaven?

1. Serialised blogpost writing

   I wrote at least two serialised pieces:

   • The first series started with breaking down one of my favourite Huxley lectures; I had notes on it from before Inkhaven, that were mostly unintelligible. The three posts informed another two a couple days later on how some art is timeless and an idea called Technocautionism. The art piece was a short but somewhat complex-ish piece connecting ideas from Huxley in 1960 to modern art in NYC; it was fun but also quite gruelling to produce in a day.
   • The second was a serialised memoir-style collection of five essays tracing my delayed access to the internet and computers: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5. This was more of an emergent writing product as I intended to write only one essay on the topic. But then this turned into a bit of the story of my life, and I realised it was going to be two, possibly three, essays. But I just couldn’t stop writing and was always left asking what actually needed detailing—the obvious answer was everything so then the question was “What can I drop?”. Eventually, I decided that five parts and 6,000 words is sufficient for Inkhaven and, if I have the energy, I will return to this some day in the future. I think this is the kind of piece that reads poorly but has the fodder to morph into something more literary—so that’s a new thing I wish to work on after Inkhaven.
     This specific serialised writing offered a glimpse into how a book emerges from memoir-ish blogging; in a sense, I felt like there is so much detail here that a book could even write itself.

2. The Art of Feedback.

   I got to see a master at work and even got some written feedback from him! I took a shot in the dark and sent Scott Alexander my essay on Frontier Ideas as soon as I learned that we could request feedback. I expected to not hear back from him because let’s be real—who wouldn’t want his feedback? But god damn did I luck out! I got a reply from Scott, which was nearly the length of my essay. And sometimes you read someone’s version of what you are trying to essay and are like “you should write that essay”. Getting to see him work on other’s essays in person was also similarly delightful. Both of these were demonstrations to me, as a teacher, of what I should be emulating in terms of feedback. I have already started working on bettering my written feedback to my project students (which is a manageable 20). But the classes of nearly 400? Well, I am going to see if I can make the impossible possible.

3. Minimising LLM use in writing and thinking.

   My dependence on Claude, for a lot of my academic work and research writing, has become a crutch. It is not even very useful, but consumes enough of my time and commands enough of my attention that the distraction feels good and I feel more invigorated by it than doomscrolling that I can presume that it is work; but even talking to Claude is actually just doomscrolling. Meeting Inkhaven targets showed that my writing targets in the day-to-day are quite loose. Claude was not going to get to my targets, or at least I didn’t want Claude to get me there as I wanted the words to be mine. Even when I did ask Claude to help out with some fiction writing or sci-fi, I was quite disappointed with the results. This is probably just a matter of poor prompting, one might say. But if I have to create the words for the prompt, then why wouldn’t I spend my time typing the thing I want to type instead? That’s more useful in my story navigation process, at least for now as a beginner fiction writer. The lack of Claude reliance has also helped me type faster and more accurately again. Overall, the non-AI assisted independent writing muscle that I lost but have exercised is feeling very strong but I need to keep it useful.

   Looking ahead

I have 35 blogpost ideas that remain mostly untouched; this means I have easily another month of writing ahead, should I choose to do so. To be honest, I want to catch up on some academic writing again, movies, books, and ink-pen journaling. So, I am thinking that five posts might be an optimistic number for December but I am going to give it a shotAlongside two papers and one proposal submission; back to the grindstone but with a different energy and capability..

There are some that are an extension to ideas I started at Inkhaven but couldn’t finish, like Technocautionism, which ends quite abruptly. There are other technical pieces I began on space debris (which I will aim to have completed by end of next week) and hypersonic vehicles. But maybe I will try to revisit some fiction pieces that are also in the pipeline.

Conclusion

This reflection has a lot of hedging in it but I wanted to make sure I took note of things while the experience is still fresh. That provides a baseline against which I can check back in a few months.

Overall: 10/10 would recommend Inkhaven; I have thought about posting daily but never done it so Inkhaven has done something for me there, undoubtedly. If you’re thinking of taking up blogging and are on the fence, don’t; get started now. If Inkhaven happens again, you’ll need at least five blogposts under your belt as writing samples! The cohort writing experience is really something that will grow on you while there; I’d definitely do this again.