# Inkhaven Retrospective

Here I am on the plane on the way home from Inkhaven. Huge thanks to Ben Pace and the other organizers for inviting me. Lighthaven is a delightful venue and there sure are some brilliant writers taking part in this — both contributing writers and participants. With 40 posts published per day by participants (not counting those by organizers and contributing writers) it feels impossible to highlight samples of them. Fortunately that's been done for me: [the Inkhaven spotlight](https://inkhavenspotlight.substack.com/). And just to semi-randomly pick a single post to highlight, for making me laugh out loud, I'll link to [one by Rob Miles](https://life-in-a-monospace-typeface.tumblr.com/post/800786180245504000/the-shibari-game). There are also myriad poignant, insightful, informative, and otherwise delightful posts. And, sure, plenty that don't quite work yet. But that's the point: force yourself to keep publishing, ready or not, and trust that quality will follow.

Confession: I'm not at all happy with this post. Opening with "here I am on the plane"? Painful. I would've fixed that in an editing pass, but I'm going to leave it because it illustrates two Inkhaven lessons for me. First, that sometimes it's ok to hit publish before something is perfect. And second, that I in particular need to follow the advice (#5 in my [collection of Inkhaven tips](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpfT5FexfXS42m6fd/16-writing-tips-from-inkhaven)) to dedicate blocks of time to dumping words onto the page. Editing is separate. If I hadn't started typing "here I am on the plane" then I would've sat there agonizing about a good opener, gotten distracted, and had nothing.

Write, publish, repeat.

I'm still agonizing about whether to commit to continuing to churn out a post every day for the rest of the month now that I've left. I do have a pretty much unlimited number of ideas to write about, even sticking to the theme of writing about writing. Here are half a dozen of them:

1.  Complaining about a list of words I've been curating for which Google's built-in dictionary definitions are garbage.
2.  What a work of art the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary still is and how to configure a Mac laptop so it pops up those definitions when you hard-press on a word with the touchpad.
3.  Why Overleaf is the bees' knees for technical writing or collaborative writing (and definitely what you want for technical collaborative writing).
4.  More of my favorite word games (does that count as writing about writing? maybe I can find a way to make it count!).
5.  My ever-growing pile of notes about and examples of redefining everyday words as technical jargon ("common knowledge", "real number", "normal distribution") and how bad this is.
6.  Tips for dealing with trolls (beyond not feeding them, which is rules 1 through 17).

The problem is how daunting it feels to do justice to some of those. But that's where the writing tip to First Just Write comes in. It's been half an hour now of writing this thing and I'm starting to think I could bear to hit publish. If I do, I expect it will be the worst post I've published while at Inkhaven. But something has to be my worst post.

Judge for yourself. Here's a recap of everything else I published leading up to and during my Inkhaven stay:

1.  [Goodharting and DIY Inkhavens](https://blog.beeminder.com/inkhaven) (on the Beeminder blog)
2.  [Blogception](https://agifriday.substack.com/p/blogception) (on AGI Friday)
3.  [Against Powerful Text Editors](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kPhsMipezDLTfgmSj/against-powerful-text-editors) (mindless, repetitive edits waste less time than it seems and avoiding them is more costly than it seems)
4.  [See Your Word Count While You Write](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8G24bWJ5nE2QjCGAb/see-your-word-count-while-you-write) (I made a tool, Tallyglot, to see your word count in the LessWrong editor and other places)
5.  [Why to Commit to a Writing and Publishing Schedule](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erXSZJ8JurXr8avKe/why-to-commit-to-a-writing-and-publishing-schedule) (it matters for you and for your readers; also covers "how")
6.  [Strategically Procrastinate as an Anti-Rabbit-Hole Strategy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/so72tRiZitvDFEvmw/strategically-procrastinate-as-an-anti-rabbit-hole-strategy) (aka Just-in-timeboxing)
7.  [The Eightfold Path To Enlightened Disagreement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NJeRBsjAMmHhEzeug/the-eightfold-path-to-enlightened-disagreement) (characterize, crux, ITT, steelman, scout-mindset, etc)
8.  [Smarmbots, Secret Cyborgs, and Evolving Writing Norms](https://agifriday.substack.com/p/writing) (new rule: no plagiarizing LLMs)
9.  [Musk vs McGurk](https://agifriday.substack.com/p/mcgurk) (sensor fusion and self-driving cars)
10.  [Mnemonic Exposition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKD6iG7qPNQ8Rx4GK/mnemonic-exposition) (how to name and gender hypothetical characters)
11.  [Eat The Richtext](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFu4tZom8twYdEyeD/eat-the-richtext) (another tool I made for preserving formatting when pasting text)
12.  [The Principle of Delayed Commitment](https://blog.beeminder.com/delay) (more pro-procrastination propaganda)
13.  [Ten Wrong and Dumb Grammar Rules](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DZq6a6PyuKbhmzLWd/10-wrong-and-dumb-grammar-rules) (infinitive splitting, less-vs-fewer, syntactic vs elocutionary punctuation, etc)
14.  [Writing Tips from Inkhaven](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpfT5FexfXS42m6fd/16-writing-tips-from-inkhaven) (listicles, curse of knowledge, Hemingway Mode, the out-loud-to-your-friend constraint, etc)