inkhaven rewind

APR 30, 2026

inkhaven

You may have noticed that I've been writing a lot more than usual. The culprit is the Inkhaven Residency, where I have been ~~forced to write~~ having a glorious time writing a 500+ word post a day for the month of April.

I promised myself not to write about Inkhaven while I was at Inkhaven, but the organizing team has called for Inkhaven Retrospectives (which apparently do not count as Inkslop). But given that I wrote a separate real post today and double-posted a couple of times, I have freed myself from this constraint to write the retrospective.

If any of the following convinces you that Inkhaven is a Thing You Want To Do, Inkhaven is accepting expressions of interest for a third cohort here. If you want to skip to the advice, click here.

what did i want from inkhaven?

Mainly, I wanted to learn to write more in the face of other people's opinions, because my writing bottleneck has always been the "people will think this is bad" feeling. I hoped that the daily publishing schedule would make me less scrunchy about what people thought about my writing, and I hoped that in turn, this would increase my writing output even after Inkhaven ended.
Writing well was a secondary goal. Obviously I wanted to get better at writing, but I actually thought it would be good for me to publish some things that were below my top standard. I figured that the quality would follow with quantity, as in the parable of the pottery class.
I had very little idea of what exactly I wanted to write. I had a couple of ideas that had been sitting around, some of them for years, but I didn't have a set plan or theme. In fact, I wanted to try a lot of different styles of writing, though — fiction, research, memoir, etc. etc.
I had a couple of rules for myself throughout Inkhaven.
- No meta. You should be able to read any one of my posts without the concept of Inkhaven entering your brain. Also, no writing about writing. Especially no meta about writing at Inkhaven.
- No parts. Parts are a valid strategy for getting through Inkhaven, but I personally hated the idea of artificially splitting things up. (I think pieces want to be what they want to be, and it felt wrong to get in the way of that.) Also, I felt that splitting things up would be antithetical to writing different types of things.
- All posts should be public. This is downstream of my main goal of coming to Inkhaven at all. I already had a habit of writing a couple hundred words a day (morning pages à la Anne Lamott + regular journaling), but I only published once in a blue moon.
I also had one side theme.
- More words. This wasn't something I was thinking about at the beginning of Inkhaven — I figured 500 words a day would be hard enough. But around a week or two in, I realized that I could probably do a thousand words a day if I pushed myself. I kept the thousand words a day a vague goal in order to avoid Goodharting myself, and simply tried to stop thinking of the 500 words as a cutoff.

thoughts on the things

Now for some general thoughts and reflections.

writing

i guess im a writer now ???
- that is wild
I wanted to write so many effortposts. All of my ideas were effortposts. Why.
- The effortposts I wanted to write weren't actually that hard, per se. I think I could have knocked out any single of them in two or three days, if I tried. The problem is that I had to try, and that was hard most of the time.
- This is usually how it went: I would start the day by attempting work on the effortpost. Except that I knew that I couldn't finish the effortpost in a day, so I'd be stressed and distracted because I didn't have anything done to publish that day. Then I'd cave and work on a post for the day. But after writing the post for the day, I was tired and wanted to socialize, so I'd do that, promising myself to work on the effortpost the next day. Rinse and repeat.
- sorry valentino i promise i'll finish the things could be better post ;-;
The effortpost problem was compounded by the fact that I was never ahead. Usually, I would start writing the post for the day sometime between 11am-3pm, finishing in the evening. Then I'd socialize late into the night instead of writing extra (I wanted to hang out with everyone in the Winners' Lounge!). So I never had posts lined up in advance.
- Actually, I was ahead on Day 1 because the Muse decided that I would be Inspired at 3am that day. I kept that post in the queue and started writing another, intending to get ahead, but the second post ended up taking far too long (I did massive reworks to that post, which ended up taking a double-digit number of hours). I only published it in the evening of Day 2, blowing my whole lead. And then I was never ahead again.
Starting on ~Day 5, I was like "wow all this writing is terrible," and honestly I wasn't even wrong.
- But hey, those posts exist now. Looking back, they weren't quite so bad as I thought. And they got better over time — it was worth it.
I used The Most Dangerous Writing App sometimes, which led to gems like

fuck i don't know what to write, it is 5pm and i haven't written anything and i don't have an diea and a lot of people have told me some ideas i could write about but none of them are shiny and i don't wanna do it. but i do know that if i don't do it, i will get KICKED OUT"

I spent a bunch of ideas that were lowkey good, and I wish that I had had the time to execute them better.
- The canonical example is backwards idioms. I love the base idea, but I started writing it at ~5pm because I wasn't having a good writing day, and that really was not enough time to execute. Still, I'm glad I did it! (thanks Justis ;-;)
- But I think Maya Angelou is right when she says "You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." I kept writing and writing, and the ideas kept coming and coming. I have more ideas now than I did when Inkhaven started.
At some point, the organizing team implemented the ability to upvote posts, which made me feel blocked. For a while, I spent a lot of time neurotically checking whether my posts were doing well, whether other people liked my posts, etc. My least favorite posts are the ones from this period.
- I intentionally wrote on my own website (instead of something like Substack). Part of the reason was that I didn't want the platform to force analytics on me. If I wanted analytics, I could implement them myself, and choose the ones that mattered to me.
- I'm not upset that they implemented upvotes, though. Actually, I think it was good! Over time, I realized that the neuroticism was mostly a skill issue, and I learned how to handle it with more grace. I am a better writer for it.
Writing takes is hard. Writing fiction is hard. Writing funny is hard. But writing math and Pokémon is relatively easy. Maybe this says something about me.
Some ideas are shiny, and some ideas are not. I have no patience for non-shiny ideas, which meant a lot of my posts were idiosyncratic and tailored to myself only. I found that the shinier the idea, the more I liked the post when I was done.
I am an incredibly incredibly slow writer. Some people here were writing 1.5-2k words a day. I was not one of those people.

the blog

Most people published on Substack, but I published on my own website. My original blog was built using Eleventy, but I was getting sick of the old website wanted to learn Next.js. So I decided that it was a good idea to migrate to a new blog before Inkhaven.
Well, "before" is a strong word…I was still tinkering throughout the first week of Inkhaven. I swear I spent as much time debugging as I did writing asfldkfjalsdjk.
But despite the early hiccups, I'm glad I was working on my own website. I wanted more freedom than any platform was going to offer me — things like custom styling and LaTeX.
- Did you know that Substack doesn't support inline math??? Immediate dealbreaker for a math-pilled person like me. Speaking of Substack — I tried to syndicate there at some point, but I found it so annoying that I gave up within an hour of trying.
Also, it was nice to have non-writing work available. Sometimes I wanted to do something with my brain that was not writing, and it was useful to have a default task to go to, because that meant I wouldn't be scrolling.

lighthaven

Lighthaven is so pretty. It feels alive.
- I explored the whole campus on Day 0, finding the laundry room fridges and Bayes attic per Gwern's recommendation. Claire also gave me a tour (very sweet of her!). I remember (i) feeling like a witch, (ii) taking interior design inspiration, and (iii) wanting to live here forever. The nooks and secret tunnels are exactly my jam, and I am sad that I have to leave so soon.
- But I still spent like 90% of my writing time in my room. I had a nice desk and chair and monitor in there, and everywhere else was too pretty (read: distracting) to be conducive to writing.
There are so many snacks! I was immediately sniped by the Glacier Freeze Gatorade and Kettle Corn Popcorners. How did they know those were my favorites? This place is magical, I tell you.
- A back-of-the-envelope calculation (3-5 bags of chips a day $\times$ 30 days) says I ate at least a hundred bags of chips. I'm trying not to think about it that hard.
There are infinitely many supplements and medications and stuff. I possibly solved a nutritional deficiency while I was here, which if true, might be the biggest impact Inkhaven has had on me. Which is saying something, because there have been many.

people

Everyone is extremely interesting and smart and nice.
- I swear everyone here is a literal genius? Or at least well-informed about most things. On top of that, everyone is interesting to talk to, and most people have insights across many domains.
- Because of this, I spent a lot of time feeling incredibly stupid and dumb. It probably didn't help that I didn't have a Thing yet — most people here are older than me, with Real Jobs and such — but I think that this was mostly a skill issue, and it got better over time. But I should definitely read more books.
- Everyone is nice and open to talking, and they are especially happy to explain things to you. You can ask stupid, deep, or weird questions and people will give you real answers. I've received more useful advice in the last month than I have in the last year, just because people are willing to offer you well-reasoned perspectives and help you think through things.
I did not have the bandwidth to talk to people as much as I wanted to.
- Downstream of the "everyone is extremely interesting and smart" thing, people will jump at the chance to have engaging intellectual discussions. This is great 90% of the time, but difficult to sustain as your only form of social interaction.
- It was kind of like being at a conference for a month. I very quickly learned that i needed to take my time alone, or I was going to literally lose it.
- This feeling got better over time as I made closer friends. It probably helped that I was less on-guard and didn't care so much about whether people thought I was dumb or not.
But the people I met here are actually so great. Like I hope they're friends with me forever kind of great.

other thoughts

Everyone kept confusing me for the one other young Korean girl (no I am not Sophie). My guess is that her bio was more memorable than mine for the AI safety people, but still! It was annoying. I was being misnamed until the last day, grrr.
The culture was very much "ask for forgiveness and not for permission." At the beginning, this was hard because one of my greatest fears is people being mad at me. But I adjusted over time, and I think I experienced a meaningful increase in agency while I was here. This is one of the greatest impacts Inkhaven had on me as a person.
I lowkey didn't get advised by any of the advisors.
- I'm not mad about this at all. Given the emotional state I was in and what my goals were, I think having people — especially high-status people — look at my writing and say things would have killed my desire to write anything at all. This would have been the worst outcome possible, even worse than writing poorly.
- Besides, I felt like I had a pretty good sense of what I wanted . I'm inclined to agree with Claire's advice here — it's better to seek out advice from specific people who will understand what you're going for, rather than the famous people.
- Instead of getting advised by the advisors, I just talked to them! They were cool and fun people like everyone else at Inkhaven.
Fellow resident Henry made Brinkhaven, a dashboard ranking the residents by publication date, word count, etc.
- I didn't realize that I would be so motivated by Big Number Get Bigger or The Big Bad Leaderboard, but I was. I even double-posted a couple of times after Brinkhaven became a thing!
I got sick at Bodega Bay and stayed sick for a week because I refused to rest. This was bad and I probably shouldn't have done it. But I did discover that zinc lozenges exist, which was cool.
I lost a bunch of anchoring habits. I stopped doing my morning pages and daily journaling. I climbed less and did less yoga. I kept forgetting to eat.
- Losing the journaling habit makes me the saddest, because it means that I didn't keep a record of the things that happened. I understand why I stopped journaling, though, given the sheer amount of writing I was doing. I would look at the page and think "nope nope no more words for today," and that was that. Still, I'll probably try to backfill my journal as much as possible. It should be easier now that dictation is good.
The merch was pretty! I liked the stickers and the Wordpress.com Moleskines and hats, and I'm so happy that I completed the Inkhaven Prestige Run to get the special pin. (now I can flex it to all my friends — hell yeah I did Inkhaven!)

did i do what i wanted to do?

Yes. So very much, yes. I learned what it felt like to write the things I wanted to write, and I learned what it felt like to write things that I didn't want to write, too. Over and over, I bared my soul in these weird, idiosyncratic pieces, and I watched myself thrive as I let myself do it. I collected a whole bunch of posts in a whole bunch of categories, some of them stupid. I wrote a post full of korean recipes and a sillypost about idioms and a technical math post that had errors when it was first published. I learned that I could do all of these things and more, and I came out of Inkhaven loving the writing process so, so much.
I think I became a better writer, too, mostly because of an improvement in taste. Being exposed to copious amounts of good writing helped; instead of looking at Tumblr memes, I was reading blog posts written by smart people, which helped me understand what good writing looks like. Also, the daily "post or perish" structure meant that by ~Day 7, I could look back at any particular post without getting too attached, because, well, there were so many other posts I had written. I was able to look at my work more objectively and understand what I wanted to do more clearly.
But how did I do with my rules?
- No meta. I succeeded! The post that was the closest to being meta was paint paint paint paint paint paint, which is about painting the mural for the Inkhaven Fair. But the post wasn't about Inkhaven, it was about painting (I just happened to be painting at Inkhaven). So my ruling is that this is not a meta post.
- No parts. I won! woot woot! Technically, there was one time that I double-posted about being sick (here and here) which could seem like parts, but I think these wanted to be separate posts (and besides, I posted twice in one day so it's fine anyway). Let's go!!
- All posts should be public. I actually actually did this one. No technicalities here. Yay!
More words. Kinda…? I think the attitude of "500 isn't the cutoff" helped me write better, but I'm not sure I wrote meaningfully longer posts because of it. My longest "real" post was this math post that I wrote on Day 27, but this retrospective is by far the longest post I've written at Inkhaven — it's more than twice as long as the next longest post! As for the soft goal of thousand words a day: it depends on how you count. According to Brinkhaven, I cleared it! But according to the official Inkhaven portal, I am just short or slightly over, depending on whether you count this retrospective or not.

advice

Now for the juicy, juicy advice you've all been waiting for!

Make friends (and make out?). If you are the kind of person who would apply to and attend Inkhaven, you are likely to get along with the other people here. At the beginning, it may feel like this is not the case, especially because the median Inkhaven resident is so interesting that the surface-level differences are overwhelming. But I promise that there is common ground; you'll see what I mean if you just keep talking. Deep connections with your fellow residents are waiting for if you simply keep your eyes open. (as for making out -- I didn't do any myself, but people who did seemed to have fun. i think it's a valid recommendation.)
Stay at Lighthaven. It's so much easier to connect and meet people if you live on-campus. I spent a lot of nights off-campus for various reasons, and looking back, I wish I hadn't. I lost a lot of time that I could have spent meeting people or writing or doing anything but commuting, and this is the biggest regret I have.
Pick shiny ideas. You care about some things and you don't care about others. Write about the ones you care about. If the writing isn't happening, it's because you don't want to do it, and you should pick another idea that you like better.
Convince yourself that your opinion matters. Good writing comes from people who think they have things to say. Do whatever it takes to make you feel like you can say what you want, not what makes you cool or smart or whatever. Maybe that's ignoring all analytics. Maybe that's looking at all the analytics to see that people are listening to you. Maybe it's having a friend tell you what they like about your writing, or having a mentor encourage you to keep going. Whatever it is, find it. Fear is what causes writing to die.
Find an advisor you think is cool and vibes. I felt a little bit lost at the beginning, especially because I didn't know any of the other residents very well. For me, it was helpful to have mentors because they (hi justis and valentino! you guys were cool and vibes)
Talk about what you wrote, but not about what you're going to write. Everyone is a writer, so it's fun to talk about what you've written. This is a great thing to talk about. But don't tell people what you're going to write. Every time I told someone I was going to write something, the idea immediately becamse 10x less shiny. I think I had a <10% hit rate on writing pieces that I told people about. Alexander Wales is right about this.
Don't use LLMs to write for you. Dude, if that's what you're doing, what's the point?
Turn off the word count. Just trust me on this one.
Take care of yourself. Figure out how to sleep, and don't get sick. Eat. Drink water. Go to the gym. It was so easy to forget all of the basics because I wanted to do so many other shiny things, but it was hard to enjoy things when I was physically having a hard time.

conclusion

This was a long long post to say that Inkhaven was everything that I wanted it to be. I met wonderful people that I want in my life forever. I learned so much about myself, what I want and how to get it. I grew so much as a writer and as a person and as a friend, and I am so very grateful that I got to be a part of Inkhaven.

Like I said earlier, Inkhaven is accepting expressions of interest for a third cohort here. I can't recommend it enough.

kaylee kim

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